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Post by Dante on Nov 10, 2015 3:46:07 GMT -5
Thanks, gliquey; I've made those edits, and I do appreciate having them pointed out. If you feel mean about it, please look forward to later when you will have the opportunity for far greater complaints about story direction.
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Post by Dante on Nov 11, 2015 5:43:25 GMT -5
CHAPTER FOUR Shortly afterwards, the Mitchums restarted the car and resumed their drive with me back to the Lost Arms. It seemed like forever since I had parted ways with Ornette, and even longer since I had seen the rest of my associates. Along the way, the bell rang again, and all four of us listened carefully to see if this time it would be the big one, the continuous alarm, but it was not, and we were able to put our masks away and breathe freely again. It was very late at night now, but I don’t think any one of us felt sleepy, though I was certainly tired. But I was too anxious to feel like sleeping. I was anxious about whatever might happen next, while I was stuck in the Mitchums’ car, or waiting for morning to come. What happened next was that we saw another pair of headlights, farther down the road. “They’re out late,” Mimi Mitchum grumbled. “So are we, Mimi,” murmured Harvey, who had his eyes shut to try and fool himself into believing he was asleep. “That’s different, Harvey, we’re the police,” Mimi snapped back, but before this could evolve into another tiresome argument, she was frowning at the car ahead again rather than her husband. “Not only is that car out late, it’s also speeding! Looks like I’ll get to make an arrest tonight after all!” I heard her foot slam down on the accelerator, and the police car began to reach worrying speeds as it rattled along the pitch-black and crumbling roads, which were probably never meant for such rough treatment. Within moments we were threatening to ram the back of the speeding car, the red flashlight on the Mitchums’ roof picking out every dent and scratch on its ill-used surface, but it was not just the prospect of a car crash that made me groan with disappointment. It was the fact that I had a terrible suspicion that I recognised the back of that speeding car, and though the red light made it hard to tell the car’s true colour, I had a horrible feeling that it might just be green. “They’re stopping!” Mimi crowed, and began to slow her own vehicle down as the vehicle in front began to crawl to a halt, the driver evidently realising it stood no chance in outrunning the law if the law were prepared to drive even more recklessly than themselves. The flashlight illuminated what looked like an immense bundle of straw sitting in the driver’s seat. Harvey and Mimi shoved open their doors and clambered out of the police car. Unnoticed by them, I followed suit, and we all walked around the edge of the green roadster to confront the person who had been driving it, and the dim glow of a nearby streetlamp revealed the messy heap of straw turning to show that it was wearing a mask. “Good evening, my dear sir and madam,” the mask said, in a deep, deep voice. “Can you direct me to the finger puppet store?” “You can direct your mask off your face,” scowled Mimi Mitchum. “We can’t tell who you are while you’re wearing that thing.” “Theodora, you can stop wearing the mask now,” I interrupted. “We were just looking for you.” “Snicket?!” squawked the masked figure in a very un-deep voice, and a pair of scrabbling hands removed the mask with some embarrassment to reveal a small leather helmet with goggles, which the hands again removed to reveal the only person in Stain’d-by-the-Sea with more hair than they had body, S. Theodora Markson, my chaperone and supposed mentor. The last time I’d seen her, she’d told me she’d be sleeping late that day, which was why I was so confident she’d still be there when I sent my associates to collect her from our hotel room so she could help retrieve the Bombinating Beast, and I wondered how well she’d done. “So it was you!” gasped Harvey Mitchum. “F. Theodora Markson!” “If that is your real name,” Mimi said, slyly. “It’s not,” Theodora whined. “It’s S. Theodora Markson. S.!” She looked down at her lap, and sniffled slightly. “The S. is significant.” “So, Significant Theodora Markson,” Mimi declared, “if that is your real name…” Theodora opened her mouth to complain again, and then, seeing me slowly shake my head, shut it again. Some battles aren’t worth fighting. “It seems it’s like parent, like child,” Mimi went on, gesturing to me as if I was Theodora’s child or she was a parent. “First we arrest your son for behaving suspiciously in a hotel –” “ I arrested him,” grumbled Harvey, but Mimi ignored him and went on. “…and now we find you behaving suspiciously in a car in the middle of the night,” she concluded. “Suspicious behaviour is our number one top priority at the moment, Miss S. There’s been a wave of suspicious behaviour since you two arrived in town, and once again we find you two at the heart of it. Would you care to explain yourself?” Theodora’s eyes flashed from Mimi to me to her gloved hands resting on the steering wheel. I wanted her to explain herself too, but preferably not in front of the Mitchums, who I didn’t imagine would understand the significance of her mission any better than they usually did. I was probably as nervous about what she would tell the Mitchums as she was, and I just hoped she could come up with something good fast, which would be a first. “You see,” she began, slowly, “it’s quite simple, officers. I was…” Her eyes flicked over to me again, and suddenly her expression cleared. “I was coming to pick up Snicket,” she declared. “I’d heard on the grapevine that he’d been arrested again, and was hurrying down to the police station to collect him so I can keep an eye on him.” The audacity of this statement really did make my jaw drop and take my breath away. It was a flagrant lie that made no sense. Nobody but the Mitchums knew that I’d been arrested, and we’d seen nobody since my arrest. Also, the Lost Arms and the police station were on the same road, where there was neither the need nor the space for the high-speed chase we’d just had. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together could possibly believe a word of it. “Well, her story checks out,” Mimi said to her husband with a sigh, and he shrugged at her. Evidently their sole brain cells were not rubbing together that night. Harvey gave me a fierce look that seemed more like a criminal’s than a policeman’s. “I guess you’re free to go, Snicket, so long as it’s with Markson. Don’t let me see you out of her presence again, though, because if you do, I’ll just have to arrest you for breaking house arrest, and then it’ll be jail arrest.” I nodded in what I hoped was a rueful manner. I supposed I would have to stick with Theodora until the Mitchums forgot about this, which wasn’t a great result for either of us. I dropped the act the moment the Mitchums turned away and strode back to their car. I imagined it was past Stew’s bedtime. I got in the front of the roadster next to Theodora, and we waited for the Mitchums’ car to pull away and vanish into the labyrinth of night before I turned to her. “So?” I said. “How did it go?” I leaned closer. “Did you get the Bombinating Beast?” Theodora avoided my gaze, and didn’t answer for a few moments, which told me that she was searching for excuses. “No,” she admitted. “By the time me and the Mallahan girl got back to the pharmacy, it was already shut. We looked around for another way in or to see if the owner might leave and leave the place empty, but nothing happened and we had to give up.” It was a disappointment, but it wasn’t unexpected, and to be fair, it wasn’t like I’d done any better. “Let’s call it a night,” I sighed. “We’ll come up with another plan in the morning. How far is it back to the Lost Arms?” “You don’t know where we are, Snicket?” Theodora asked, sounding surprised. She started up the car, and a couple of attempts later it worked. “I thought you spent the whole time wandering this town’s streets like a delinquent.” Delinquents are young people who hang around gloomy streets and occasionally commit crimes. I wanted to be offended, but realistically, I couldn’t deny that the description was pretty close. “I don’t go wandering around at night,” I replied, “and I just know a few places very well, not the whole place fairly well.” “Well,” Theodora muttered, as we started to inch along the road. “I suppose I got lost, too. It is night, as you said. I was just coming back from taking Mallahan to her home – I didn’t trust those two children in their stolen car, so we switched to mine – and then I was distracted by the bells.” With those reassuring statements, she set the car going. “Speaking of which, have you heard about this saltstorm business?” she asked, her voice trembling. “We should get ready so we can skip town at any moment.” “The saltstorm is most likely a myth,” I said, “but we might leave town for a while tomorrow. I’ve heard about some funny business going on at a place in the valley called Wizard’s Hollow. It’s a spooky cave where an evil wizard once lived.” “We’re going there, aren’t we, Snicket?” “Once it’s light, we had better,” I said. “I want to see this for myself, and you’ll have to see this too or else we’ll probably both get arrested.” I wouldn’t have admitted it, but it was also probably a good idea to bring an adult along, even if that adult was only Theodora. Hangfire had been getting especially ruthless and violent of late, and while I wouldn’t say that Theodora made me feel any safer, she was probably slightly harder to capture than some of my associates, if it came to a fight or a chase, which I truly hoped it wouldn’t. “But we’ll have to go and look up Moxie first and think about how to proceed with the Bombinating Beast.” “Oh, we don’t need to do that,” Theodora interrupted. “She told me that she’d get her father to help out. You forget that the statue is strictly speaking his property, Snicket.” I hadn’t forgotten, but I was surprised that Moxie thought she might be able to convince her father to help her. I wasn’t sure when he had last even left the house, so I’d completely discounted him. “I suppose there’s nothing to stop us from going straight to Wizard’s Hollow tomorrow morning, then.” Theodora gave a deep, weary sigh. “I suppose,” she echoed. It felt strange, talking to Theodora like this – as something like an equal and an ally. It had never happened before, because for too long she had never cared to help and never cared to listen to me. To be honest, it was still clear that she didn’t care very much, but it felt like what having a chaperone was probably meant to feel like; it felt like she would help and would listen. It felt like one day I might actually be able to say that I trusted her. Still, when we finally parked up on the curb by the Lost Arms, I caught her looking back at the roadster from the hotel doorway, and wondered if she wasn’t thinking of sneaking out in the middle of the night to skip town after all. I didn’t blame her for that, not really. There were too many times where I wished I could skip town myself. Away from Stain’d-by-the-Sea, my sister had recently been put in jail herself, and then had broken out, and now was in a great deal of trouble. She had attempted to steal a certain item, and that item had fallen into the hands of the worst possible person, and our whole organisation was in an uproar trying to get it back. I wasn’t allowed to participate, though. I had been told to stay in Stain’d-by-the-Sea with Theodora, and I would have done so anyway. There was a mystery here that I didn’t think anyone else could solve. Morning came after a night of restless sleep. Usually, either I arrived back at the hotel far later than Theodora or vice-versa, so one of us was already asleep by the time the other was preparing for bed, and that suited us well enough as, like many people who live together, we otherwise tended to spend too much time getting in each other’s way. It probably wasn’t the best start to an investigation to have spent the night listening to each other rolling around sleeplessly, and, just when I did get to sleep, to be started awake by Theodora whispering “Are you asleep, Snicket?” After the third time I just dumped my blankets in the corridor outside and actually got some sleep, but still had to endure being woken up by Theodora opening the door into me. The Lost Arms had been quiet when we’d gotten in the evening before, and it was only when it was still quiet the morning after that I remembered what Ornette had said about her father taking her out of town. I guess he hadn’t locked up behind him, which was considerate, but the place stopped being ramshackle and started being simply creepy once it became apparent to me and Theodora that there was nobody else in the building whatsoever. The halls were unlit and silent; there was no gurgling of water through pipes or clink of coins in the telephone; there was no Prosper Lost in the lobby to ooze up and ask how he couldn’t help us today. The building was drafty and lonely. It felt like Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Neither me nor Theodora spoke to each other as we prepared for our excursion that morning. It felt strangely like it might call up ghosts. Theodora’s green roadster looked somehow worse than ever outside the Lost Arms, its green skin peeling and bruised like an apple someone dropped in the gutter. Up the street was Hungry’s, and down the street were the police station and library, and in the distance I could see the looming Ink Inc. tower with its gleaming fountain-pen turret, and even farther I could just make out the spindle of the lighthouse where Moxie lived. Maybe it was earlier than I thought, but the roads were quiet, without the distant sound of a car’s engine or even the wind, and the light fell sluggishly through grey clouds. I wondered what my friends were doing, while I prepared to venture into Wizard’s Hollow. They all had their own errands to pursue, and I had mine, but driving around town with Theodora in her roadster reminded me of when I had first arrived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and had no one, only an unfamiliar and unfriendly chaperone. If we were to turn around and leave town just like that, it would almost be as if we had never arrived at all. The chugging of the roadster’s engine put its grubby fingerprints over the silence, and off we went. The route to Wizard’s Hollow went, as the Mitchums had told me, past Moxie’s lighthouse and a place called Godwit Falls, and that happened to lead us through Flounder Ponds again. I recognised the roads from my previous trip there; the Swinster Pharmacy wasn’t far away. “Can we detour down Yamgraz Drive?” I asked Theodora, on a whim. “Past the pharmacy?” Theodora frowned. “That’ll just make them suspicious, Snicket.” “I just want to see if Moxie and her father are there already,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if that was the real reason. “We don’t need to stop and interrupt, drive straight past and see if anything’s happening.” The sign for Yamgraz Drive was approaching, and Theodora looked at it like it had personally insulted her. “One of these days, Snicket, you must learn not to be a backseat driver,” she said, as she sulkily turned the car beside it. I didn’t point out that I was in the passenger seat. I just looked out the window for the Swinster Pharmacy as we hurried down the road, and then I realised that we were at the end of the road and turning out again and I was confused. I didn’t understand what had just happened. “Did you see that?” I asked. “What’s that, Snicket?” Theodora asked. “I didn’t see anything.” “Exactly,” I argued. “Turn around.” Maybe Theodora understood, as she didn’t argue back this time as she turned the car around, taking all the time in the world on the empty, uninhabited street, and we drove back up Yamgraz Drive more slowly this time with both of us keeping our eyes on both sides of the street and we still didn’t see anything. I didn’t say anything, either, and neither did Theodora, as she turned back onto the road we had been taking, out to Godwit Falls and Wizard’s Hollow. There is nothing to say when you have seen nothing. I once read a book, another of my brother’s, about a man who discovers a dead body in a toyshop one night, and returns the following day to find that not only has the body disappeared, but so has the toyshop. I cannot read that book anymore, because I cannot help but be reminded of the nothing I saw on Yamgraz Drive, just as that same nothing reminded me of the book at the time. I wasn’t looking for a body, not then, but even driving along the road not once but twice then instead of seeing a pharmacy, I saw nothing. There was no ugly, faded square building, no window with three styrofoam heads, and certainly no Bombinating Beast anywhere to be seen. There was simply a row of dingy, unremarkable houses, broken by a gap like a missing tooth, where a wide, square hole was filled with rubble and churned earth. I kept thinking about that nothing, that empty lot, that patch of disturbed earth that had replaced the Swinster Pharmacy as the roadster continued to disturb the silent roads on the edge of town. The lighthouse on its high peak rose up on one side of us, and the trickle of Godwit Falls in its steep and rocky cleft in the earth followed us down on the other. A bomb, perhaps, had hit the Swinster Pharmacy. A giant underground monster had swallowed it up. A huge shadow of a man striding across the town had picked it up in his enormous claw. Or maybe the foundations had simply given out, and it had literally fallen to pieces. I remembered sitting in another car pondering over questions the night before, and how that car had suddenly jumped over a terrific crack in the earth. Earthquakes. A nest of mines and drains and tunnels undercutting the town. What was real, and what was fake? As we descended into the drained valley, the massive pile of stones that was Offshore Island rose up some way in front of us, with the viaduct meeting it as it passed from a farther edge of town, past the Wade Academy’s walls, and off to the distant mainland – and underneath that viaduct, rising up out of the ground like the fin of some gargantuan sea monster, was a ridge of jagged stone. One of the legs of the viaduct overhead thrust right through its side, like a sword pinning it to the earth, leaving it still and dead, marooned in the dry sea of shells and sand. The road took us along a raised section of the valley floor next to the ridge’s spiky crest, lined by a few boulders and tufts of unnatural seaweed, and as the road began to peter away as it followed the slight outward curve of the ridge, we could just make out a kind of black well near the top of the ridge, something like a wound of darkness in the blank face of the cliff, like an eye socket. Faint scars of silver around it revealed the chains that turned an almost vertical cliff face with only a few shallow nooks and crannies into a chain walk that a person willing to get scared later might be willing to climb. We stopped with the bonnet pointing at a plaque mounted on a stand just at the bottom of the cliff, facing up a terribly narrow path that shortly met the first of the chains. If you were to stand back, the cliff face would look like this: Rain and seawater had carved out various series of rough tracks and gulleys and notches into the rock, with the most continuous path marked out by a series of four chains, the ends of which were linked to hooped pins hammered into the rock of the cliff with considerable force, leaving the chains slightly slack but very firmly secured. This was a good thing, as the state of the cliff was such that even a highly athletic person could not possibly have climbed it unaided, and the rough paths, if they could even be called paths, would be almost certainly fatal if followed for more than a metre or so without a chain to hang onto. The first two chains led diagonally up from the middle of the cliff base to way on the left, then along a third chain to the right, and with a fourth chain leading diagonally down and right to the end of the walk. The vast arches of the viaduct soared overhead like the Roman ruins I had seen in pictures, with one of the footings, the size of a small building itself, striking somewhere in the rear of the cliff and rising up above the left side of the chain walk; above the right side was what looked like it had once been two broad and pointed peaks, but one of them had apparently been broken at some point, leaving only a stump to join its partner in the cloudy murk above. And then there was the sickening cave mouth… The plaque had probably once shown all this and more, along with interesting details of the history of the cave and the chain walk and photographs and diagrams of construction work in the area, but vandalism had struck it like a fly landing on a delicious slice of cake, and it had been shattered so that no trace of the educational and entertaining details it once held now remained. A spot of rain helped dampen my spirits as I got out of the roadster; a faint drizzle was blowing in from beyond Wade Academy, with blacker clouds still to come. I remembered what Harvey Mitchum had said about the chain walk being dangerous in rainy conditions. We would have to get to the cave quickly to avoid being caught in a downpour, and the way the wind caught at the edges of Theodora’s hair as she stepped out of the car told me it was coming our way fast. She’d been looking more and more apprehensive, or simply queasy, about this whole excursion as we’d gotten closer and closer to our destination, and I’d taken my eyes off the cave to gauge her reaction to seeing it in person. Trepidation I had expected; alarm and terror I certainly hadn’t, but I didn’t need her to point a trembling finger up at the cave mouth for me to know something was wrong, and look back. Way up the cliff, in the cave mouth, there was a person. I knew immediately who it was, if only because it was exactly who I secretly expected to see – exactly who I wanted to see, perhaps. If I was being honest, the perspective was so distorted from the bottom of the cliff that it could have been a woman rather than a girl, and what my mind told me was hair so black it made the night look pale was actually something else covering the person’s head. It was a mask, a mask I had seen before, a crude carving of a ferocious snarl cut into a piece of pure-black wood, with one curving horn and one stump where the other horn had broken off. The mask represented the Bombinating Beast, which I had followed through every one of my investigations in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but this mask was special, for it only appeared when one of the Stain’d Myth Murders was afoot. But the voice that spoke from behind the mask was a girl’s voice, a girl with hair so black it made the night look pale, a girl whose green eyes and unreadable smile were hidden but whose identity was unmistakeable. The girl was Ellington Feint, and she spoke to me now, from high up in the mouth of Wizard’s Hollow. “This is the last warning I can give you, Lemony Snicket,” she called down to me, her voice cold and sad behind the mask. “You’re wrong. You’re making a huge mistake.” “People often tell me that when I’m on the right track,” I called back up to her. I couldn’t help myself. I could tell that she was completely serious, perhaps more so than ever before, but I still felt this wild urge to give some witty reply – perhaps to goad her into being her normal self again, rather than this cold and sad and serious girl who delivered final warnings on behalf of criminal gangs. But she only shook her head, and continued. “Get out of town now and you might still have a chance,” she said, with all the solemnity of an announcement – of a prophecy. “But if you come to this cave, I promise you, you will be trapped in a vortex of terrible despair, unable to do anything but watch as we tear down what you have fought for. It will be the end.” “Why?” I shouted back up, but a gust of wind caught my words and threw them away. “What is Hangfire planning?” I cried, but as the rain picked up, lancing from the heavens and striking the earth around my feet, she only retreated into the cave and out of sight. The first chain was just up a couple of steps, and I looked at it like a lifeline – a yellow brick road to those emerald eyes. “We’ve got her,” I called to Theodora, who was still staring up at the cave. “There’s no possible way down. She’s cornered.” Theodora looked at me like I was insane. “Are you insane, Snicket?” she asked, looking from me to the cave and back to the roadster. “This is an obvious trap! What do you think is going to happen when we get up there?” “There’s only one way to find out,” I said. The splash of a raindrop on my nose reminded me that I had to move fast, and I started walking towards the first chain. Behind me, I heard Theodora stamp her foot in frustration. “We could both be killed, Snicket!” I thought of the people who had been killed, and of what had happened on previous occasions when I had fallen into Hangfire’s clutches – or even into Ellington’s. “I don’t think so,” I told her, as I put my hand upon the first chain. It was cold, but it felt sturdy. I trusted it. “Ellington won’t murder us, and she won’t let anyone else murder us either,” I said, but I wasn’t looking at Theodora any more. The chains weren’t as shiny as they had once been, but they still reflected me in a million directions. “Besides, she and anyone with her will be trapped in that cave with no escape, while we’ll have the way out on our side.” I heard a clunk from the roadster, and Theodora’s steps hurrying towards me. “Then take this, Snicket,” her voice said, and I looked back to see that she’d opened the car’s trunk and was holding an electric torch out to me. “Use this if it’s dark… and maybe if it’s dangerous, too,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I’ll follow you in a few moments. I have a raincoat in the trunk.” I pocketed the torch. “Do you have a raincoat for me?” I asked. “No,” she said, and turned away – and I turned away, too, and began to climb. It was as true to call it a climb as a walk, as there was no going up without using your hands. The chain, narrow and strong like the chain on a pair of handcuffs, was something like a rope and something like a bannister, an anchor that kept you close to the cliff edge where the path was narrow and something to hold onto when the path sunk into the rock and you could only feel with your toes for the next foothold. At those times, it truly was impossible to ascend without the chain, and I felt all the more certain that Ellington was completely trapped – her and anyone she happened to have hidden with her. I was going up to Wizard’s Hollow, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew there was every danger that she’d kept someone with her, perhaps someone with a weapon – a cudgel, perhaps, or a syringe. But at the front of the cave I’d have a way out, and at the back of the cave they wouldn’t – for nobody had ever mentioned the cave having any kind of tunnel or other exit, and it was ludicrous to think that the Inhumane Society could have mined one out themselves just to catch me or the Mitchums or whoever they were targeting. As I grappled with the chain, though, it became clear that there would be no hurrying to the cave, despite my urgency. It simply wasn’t safe to hurry. Normally, when you walk down a path or street, you probably do not pay very much attention to where you are putting your feet or what you are doing with your hands, but on the chain walk, every footstep and handgrip had to be chosen carefully and with certainty. If I missed my footing, or grabbed too blindly at the chain, it was all too likely that one of my limbs would slip away from the path, and take the rest of them with it. I hadn’t possessed a wristwatch for quite some time, but as I finally reached the steep few steps worn and kicked into the rock and had to climb hand over hand to the end of only the first chain, I could tell that it had taken me quite a few minutes – and for every one of those minutes, I’d had to be totally focussed on the path and the chain, and couldn’t look more than a couple of feet ahead – and certainly couldn’t look behind without stopping. Where the first chain terminated in a metal ring there was a slightly wider area, where it was possible to stop and rest and maybe even pass someone taking the walk in the opposite direction, since it was impossible to cross while on the chains, and impossible to miss anyone crossing your path at any time. I did stop and rest, although it was mainly to look around. I was only one quarter of the way to the cave, and it felt like any number of things could have happened while I was stuck on that chain. The curvature of the cliff face was already beginning to hide the entrance to the cave, and above it the sky was taking on an increasingly black and greasy turn. Although the walk had clearly not been climbed often enough to leave the path muddy and dangerous, I could see smooth and sheer rocks along parts of the path ahead which would be like ice after a little rain – and the rain was starting to soak through my hat, telling me that it wasn’t letting up any time soon. Below me, not far up the first chain, Theodora was finally following my lead. It looked like she’d had a struggle trying to fit her voluminous hair into her raincoat, and had finally given up, but at least her clothes would still be dry, even if the rest of her was likely to be soaked by the time we reached the cave. Pursuing Ellington was starting to look equally attractive with finding shelter, and either way, I had to move on, tiring as the chain walk was. My instructors at the academy had sometimes repeated a maxim I had never quite understood before, which was “More haste, less speed.” The difference was the difference between doing something quickly and carelessly and less quickly and carefully. I’d have to try it sometime, and maybe the time was now. I reached for the second chain. The second chain was as long as the first, but didn’t feel quite so bad to walk; the first chain had started off on a shallow slope before getting much steeper, while the second was somewhere in-between all the way along, which made it easier to get accustomed to – but my hands weren’t getting any more accustomed to the chains, which were rubbing my palms raw. Worse, both were starting to get wet. If my hands slipped on the chain, I could be in very deep trouble; slipping all the way back to the bottom of the chain was only the best-case scenario, the worst-case, as usual, being death. The zig-zagging route taken by the chain walk to Wizard’s Hollow was only making it feel farther away than ever, and when I dared pause to glance back along the cliff, I could no longer see the cave at all, just a few faint glimpses of silver and a clinking in the wind from the chains that approached it, and Theodora’s exhausted gasping. I was most of the way along the second when she had barely finished the first, and I felt concern for her, and for whether she would even make it all the way up. But if she retreated, I would have to do the same, and I couldn’t give up now, not when I was closer to a secret, closer to Ellington, than I had been in a while. Besides, from what I had seen at the bottom of the cliff, the last two chains would be easier – or less tiring, which would be nearly the same thing. As I finally hauled myself up to the junction of the second and third chains, another niche where several worn-out channels and rivulets met, I wondered if I had been climbing for ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, or even more – less seemed too much to hope for. But I was assured of one thing, at least: Nobody was getting down from Wizard’s Hollow without the chain walk. Without the chains, all there was across, up, and down was a sheer cliff face; nowhere to go in two directions, and no means of sneaking down short of smuggling a fire engine or cherry picker behind the roadster. I looked back at Theodora, and saw her most of the way along the second chain, her hair losing none of its mass but looking even more bedraggled than usual in the rain. I took a deep breath, and reached for the third chain. The third chain was finally taking me closer to Wizard’s Hollow again, following a slight ridge that ran almost level across the face of the cliff, though a slight rise at the end barred a clear view of the cave from me. That it was relatively easy going, sliding my feet carefully along the path and running my hands smoothly across the dampening chain, did nothing to disguise the fact that this was perhaps secretly the most lethal stretch of the chain walk. I was slightly higher than Wizard’s Hollow at this point, and even if I’d been able to look anywhere but my next step, I wouldn’t have dared to look down. The easiest way not to get scared is to avoid anything scary, or so I remembered one of my associates at the academy insisting, and right now I agreed with her. It is impossible, or perhaps unwise, to avoid all frightening things in life, because some frightening things have to be endured to get some good out of them. But other frightening things are best left well alone. I don’t normally get scared of heights, but I don’t normally hang precariously from chains on lonely cliff faces forty or fifty feet off the ground. I was beginning to see the roadster again, shiny in the rain that splashed on its surface, and that made me realise that I was very nearly soaking, my hat and jacket taking the brunt of the rainfall. I paused and risked a look back at Theodora, who was just at the top of the second chain; her raincoat was shiny like oil, and her hair looked like she had a wet bear clinging to her back. As I felt for the next safe foothold along the path, my shoe slid a little on the smooth ground, like a hand on my throat. I didn’t like to admit it, but the viability of the chain walk as an escape route if things went south, or badly, in Wizard’s Hollow was starting to look like a daydream. I almost wished Ellington did have something planned, and wishful thinking started to wonder if it could be true. She’d known she would have no escape from there, so just what was her plan? What could she possibly have hoped to achieve? And then the third chain ended and just one, thankfully, remained. From a ring ahead, the chain led down via a frankly unlikely series of notches in the cliff, some of which seemed like little more than the faintest undulations of the rock. I wasn’t surprised if not many people actually ever got to the cave, and at this last chance I seriously considered not going myself, just turning around and sending Theodora back and following suit, and leaving Ellington to the shadows she had chosen. When you are drenched with rain and standing on the edge of a fifty-foot precipice with only a slippery chain between you and a very hard landing, it is easy to question your life choices. Could there have been a better way to investigate Wizard’s Hollow? Was I being far, far too easily lured in by Ellington without having any idea of what I was getting into? Yes. Yes, almost certainly, but unfortunately, those mistakes were in the past, and didn’t help me at all in my present situation. They didn’t take me back in time from that precarious and slippery ledge, and they certainly didn’t spirit my chaperone away with me. Ellington couldn’t have planned it better. We really were trapped, and had no choice but to slip down that last, terrifying chain to stand, at last, outside the mouth of Wizard’s Hollow. As a cave, there wasn’t anything obviously remarkable or out of the ordinary about it. The mouth was a couple of metres high by a couple wide, about the size of a comfortable corridor. It didn’t have blood-coloured stains running from the entrance, there was no giant boulder outside that could be rolled in front of the entrance to seal it, and I couldn’t see any eerie fanged stalactites or stalagmites – the sharp word for the pointed downwards ones, and the blunt word for the stumpy upwards ones – but to be honest, the rain had grown heavy enough that I wasn’t really interested in noticing anything. If Hangfire himself had been standing just on the edge of my vision, wielding the heavy Beast-shaped cudgel or sword-cane he’d menaced me with on previous occasions, I would still have ducked just out of the rainfall. But I saw nothing, and in retrospect, I realise that the nothing I saw was a lot like the nothing I saw on Yamgraz Drive; something in the shape of the cave mouth, the direction it was facing, the black and blurred sky, made the cave unnaturally dark, so that I could see barely a foot inside. Although I saw nothing, anything could have been inside, but still, I went in. It was the wrong thing to do, but at that moment, anything was the wrong thing to do. The problem of being in near-total darkness in a cave hit me like a stalactite to the face after just a few damp steps. I stumbled back and flailed embarrassingly about for a few seconds before remembering that I had a torch and hurriedly turned it on. It had indeed been a stalactite, although the bigger surprise was that Theodora had given me something that worked and was useful. Theodora would still have been on the fourth chain, so I waited for her in the cave mouth and cautiously flashed the torch around a bit. The cave floor was relatively even, and dry save for my damp footprints, which showed up clearly on the stone. A couple of stalactites did, after all, descend from the ceiling, paired with stalagmites on the floor beneath, but they didn’t fit my nightmare scenario of somebody breaking them off to impale someone with. The cave narrowed slightly as it burrowed further into the cliffside, and I could dimly see it begin to turn down and to the right. The torch’s dim yellow light made the cave look darker than it did in the dark. I was more aware of the limits of my sight, restricted to a small, fuzzy-edged circle of light that bounced dully off the narrowing walls. The back of the cave could have been behind a veil, visible only as a suggestion, but still concealing nothing. There was nowhere to hide, and that was the thing that made me increasingly nervous, nervous that something impossible was about to happen. Ellington had walked into a cave she had no way out of and nowhere to hide. She hadn’t done this without a plan, but what could that plan have been when the only road open to her was about to meet a dead end? “Snicket!” Theodora’s exhausted cry ricocheted around the cave like a bullet as she stumbled in out of the rain, scaring the life out of me and ruining all possible element of surprise we might have had. She staggered in and leaned against the wall while I flicked the torch between her and the back of the cave. When I wasn’t looking felt like just when something terrible might emerge from the area just beyond my sight. Theodora wrung out a lock of her waterlogged hedge of hair before giving up the rest as a bad job. “There really didn’t need to be a trap here at all,” she muttered. “Maybe they just heard a weather forecast. I nearly fell on those chains, Snicket. Twice! And now we’re really trapped here. If you were a better apprentice, you’d never have insisted we come out here.” “If you were a better chaperone, you wouldn’t have agreed,” I pointed out, and Theodora scowled at me and didn’t answer. She was right, though. This had been a bad idea from start to finish, and my only excuses were sleeplessness and Ellington Feint. They weren’t good excuses, but without any other leads to follow, they were enough. They had led me and Theodora, totally soaked through and absolutely clueless, to a cave which, one way or another, we had to go to, and there were just a few footsteps left to be taken before we found out why we were here. I shone the torch down the cave again. Nothing changed and nothing moved, but it felt at any moment like something might. I looked back at Theodora, and she gestured me forwards. I had the electric torch, after all. I gritted my teeth, lied to myself that we might really have cornered Ellington unawares, and advanced through the cave. My damp shoes made wet sounds on the cave floor as I advanced, and Theodora supplied the sound of dripping rainwater that was receding with the outside. I thought of an old man, a wizard, trying to live here – dry and spacious, but cold and lonely. Maybe he conjured up his supplies with magic, I thought. Or maybe you give this town’s myths too much credit. The cave had no signs of life in it except for those that Theodora and myself could provide, no signs of anyone having ever lived there, no signs of anyone ever having been there for a long time. But at the tail end of the cave, at the very belly of the beast, there would be something. Ellington Feint, brooding over some hidden object. Hangfire, with his faceless mask and a deadly weapon. A wizard, waving his magic wand and chanting a spell. Think of the wizard, Snicket, not the scary things. As the curve of the cave begins to reveal itself, as the torchlight pushes back more and more of the darkness, as the cave narrows so Theodora has to duck her head and our wet shoulders rub together, as you step around the corner and the torchlight reveals…
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Post by gliquey on Nov 11, 2015 11:10:32 GMT -5
"before remembering that I had a torched and hurriedly turned it on." - "torch", not "torched"
"A huge shadow of a man striding across the town had picked it up in his enormous claw." - Is this an intentional reference to the cover of ?1? If so, I like it. If not, I still like it anyway.
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Post by Dante on Nov 11, 2015 12:40:56 GMT -5
"before remembering that I had a torched and hurriedly turned it on." - "torch", not "torched" "A huge shadow of a man striding across the town had picked it up in his enormous claw." - Is this an intentional reference to the cover of ?1? If so, I like it. If not, I still like it anyway. Noted, and - yes. I like including little nods and winks and in-jokes like this for the discerning reader, though there are many that are too in- and are destined to remain undiscovered. Also, incidentally, my original plans for ?b involved an overt reference to the infamous "diagonal line" of ?1's cover. To add a little bonus behind-the-scenes writing information, I thought I would mention that, during the writing process, I actually rejigged the chapter arrangement here. This chapter was originally continuous with the next, while the previous chapter ended later. I split it up into shorter entries by including a new chapter division and striking out a later chapter concept that I didn't think served much of a purpose. The story's still far too long to be palatable as fanfiction, alas, but I do try to be considerate.
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Post by Dante on Nov 13, 2015 5:35:29 GMT -5
CHAPTER FIVE A blank wall. I stared at it, like a note written in invisible ink or a mask hiding a face. It was true that, on some level, I’d had a feeling something like this could happen, but the feeling hadn’t made sense and the experience didn’t make sense. I waved the torch up and down and around the blank end of the cave but there was no tunnel in the ceiling or floor, no hidden crevice in the walls. The cave ended there, with nowhere else to go, and without anything waiting for me. Theodora let out a slow hiss of held breath. “I knew it,” she whispered, sounding unbelievably relieved. “I knew something like this would happen. I’m just glad it was the best-case scenario.” “This is what you call the best-case scenario?” I asked, gesturing angrily at the wall. “There’s nothing there!” “Exactly,” she replied. “We haven’t been captured or harmed, just led on a wild goose chase. All of this was probably just to get us out of the way, Snicket. I did wonder if it might be, or else I wouldn’t have so readily agreed to join you.” “But –” I looked wildly around for anything, as if Ellington might suddenly pop up out of the wall to pull a silly face at me. “But Ellington’s gone! She was up here and there was no way down!” “Oh, Snicket,” sighed Theodora, giving me what was somehow one of the most patronising looks I had ever seen from her. “She just used some trick, that’s all. It doesn’t matter what it was.” But it does matter, I wanted to say. The truth matters. Explanations matter. Understanding Ellington Feint matters. But Theodora had teased me enough about Ellington in the past, and I was more not in the mood for that than I had ever been. I stormed past Theodora, flashing the torch around the rest of the cave, desperate to have missed something. I have been tricked too often, especially by Ellington, to like it much, and my sensible side was already telling me that I’d probably never have gone out here if I’d confided in anyone except my chaperone. I found myself back at the cave mouth, looking out this time, feeling increasingly angry and wet and miserable as I looked at the world that awaited me. Grey skies, grey mist, a grey curtain of rain descending from the sky. The last chain clinked against its anchoring ring, hammered into the ground right in front of the cave mouth, the hoop like a rusty spyglass out on the world. If I took a few steps farther, I’d be on top of it, on the edge of the ledge in front of the cave’s mouth, in the rain again, soaked by new water while I soaked in the old. I might be able to get a glimpse of whether better weather was coming, though, to gauge how soon it might be before Theodora and I could safely return to the town and see what had been going on in the meantime – and much as I itched to solve the mystery of Ellington’s disappearance, what might have been happening in my absence was an even bigger itch. “Good grief, is that –” Theodora hissed beside me, but I didn’t see that. I looked at her and she looked at me and she pointed a trembling finger down the cliff. She was taller than me, so I took that step forward, and then both of us were stepping forward as fast as we dared to reach the edge and see the impossibility below. It was Ellington Feint. Of course it was Ellington Feint, again, impossibly out of reach for a second time, but somehow we’d traded places. Now, me and Theodora were the ones outside of Wizard’s Hollow, and she was the one beside the roadster, staring up from far below, her green eyes hidden behind the same mask, same snarl, same broken horn. As we goggled down at her, she shook her head sadly, and then spoke in the same sad tone. “You’ve made your choice, then, Mr. Snicket,” she said, “and I have made mine. I am truly sorry.” She turned on her heel, facing back along the muddy track back into town. Her rain-sodden hair flowed out from beneath the mask and stuck to her back. She started walking. “What are you doing, Ellington?!” I finally found the voice to call after her. “How are you doing it? When, where… why?!” She paused for just a moment, and turned back. I didn’t need her to take off the mask; the smile was as real as it had ever been, inside my head. “Goodbye, Mr. Snicket,” she said, and went on walking. She didn’t look back, no matter how long I waited. A hand fell on my shoulder with a sound very much like a splash. It was Theodora’s. “Come out of the rain, Snicket,” she said. “We’ll get dry in the cave and wait for it to blow over.” “The weather,” I asked, “or the mystery?” “All of it,” she replied. “Everyone will be evacuating this town soon, but they would all have gone in another month anyway. Who cares what happens to Stain’d-by-the-Sea after it becomes a ghost town? Hangfire and that girl can have it, for all I care. Nobody else will.” Theodora steered me out of the rain and back into the mouth of the cave, where she gently pushed me to a seat on top of a stalagmite. In my mind, Ellington Feint’s words and actions, and her smile, were repeating over and over in my brain. What? How? Where? When? Why? I was so tired of asking all the wrong questions, but there were so many of them, an infinity falling around me like raindrops, and the right question invisible among them. I didn’t know what Ellington had tricked me out here for; it wasn’t a trap because she couldn’t have predicted the severity of the rain, so was it just a distraction, and what from? I didn’t know how Ellington had tricked her way down the cliff; she couldn’t have climbed or jumped or flown because the only way down was on the chain walk, and since she couldn’t have gotten down that way without taking as long going down as we had taken going up, so she would have to have passed us outside to be at the bottom by the time we were at the top, but she couldn’t have done it without being seen and there was nowhere to hide outside that I wouldn’t have seen… I had only one possibility left, one that would solve the problem of how she got out and the problem of how I would get out – the last resort of the desperate. There is never a secret passage. “There must be a secret passage,” I said, and turned to the back of the cave. “No, Snicket – it’s a cave!” exclaimed Theodora, looking up from her personal pool of water. “And you already looked everywhere!” But I’d already lit up the cave all the way to the back. The torchlight wasn’t great; the best it could do was turn the cave a muddy yellow and throw the shadows a little farther back. But it was enough to pick out the same old stalactites and stalagmites, the same uneven curves of the walls, the molten undulations of the floor, the sodden lump lying at the end of the – My breath caught in my throat. The world seemed to freeze for a moment, silent, motionless. At the very back, partially hidden by the last twist in the cave, there was a humped, glistening shape ditched on the floor, like a piece of garbage tipped there out of sight. It hadn’t been there before. Even though we had only left the cave for a minute or two, even though we had been scarcely a metre away from its mouth, something had entered the cave right behind our backs. It wasn’t the how that I was thinking of, though. It was the what. That was why the breath caught in my throat, and my heart was hammering its way out of my chest. I was terribly afraid of what that shape was, because I had already seen, twice in my life, what nobody should ever have to see, and that slumped form was suggestive of the same lurking horror. I took one step forwards, one step closer to the thing, one step’s more light shed into the dark hollow of the cave. Most of the shape vanished around the corner. The end nearest to me was attached to a pair of shoes. Trickles of water ran down the thick soles as I watched. It was the worst-case scenario, after all. I’d have liked to believe that person was just sleeping, or even unconscious, but there was never a chance of that, not in these circumstances. I tried as hard as I could not to recognise the shoes. I tried not to believe that they were child-sized. “We can still go back, Snicket. You don’t have to look,” Theodora’s voice whispered in my ear, but even as I understood what she was saying, I took another step forwards, and more light fell across the figure slumped on their side on the floor, limbs crooked in front of them, face still hidden. “Whatever you see, you won’t ever, ever be able to forget it!” hissed my chaperone, but still I took one more ever-slower step around to the end of the cave, towards the body lying there, the light revealing the edge of a broad, striped tie. Not many options left now. I already knew who it was, lying dead in that cave where they shouldn’t be. I had already recognised them, but still I took the final step with a desperate hope that I was wrong yet again instead of horribly, horribly right. An icy claw took hold of my heart and squeezed, hard. It was Moxie Mallahan who had been left there in the depths of Wizard’s Hollow, hat pushed firmly over her head, legs curved and arms across her stomach as if in great pain. She moved not an inch and took not a breath. Though there were, mercifully, no obvious wounds upon her body, I could not doubt for a second that she was dead. I couldn’t think. The sight of her body seemed to expand grotesquely to fill my vision, and my mind seemed to suddenly fell remote from my body, disconnected, every sense consumed instead by the awful spectacle before me. The vision swayed, and distantly, I sensed that somebody had stepped forwards to hold my arm, to stop me from falling, but my legs were falling under me anyway. I slumped shakily to the ground myself, a few feet of bare stone separating myself and Moxie’s body, her face now, thankfully, hidden. But Theodora was right; I wouldn’t ever, ever be able to forget what I saw. I wouldn’t be able to forget, and still have not forgotten, the way her mouth was stretched wide, so wide, and her eyes bulged outwards. Her face was shaded by dark bruises all across one side, but the rest was stricken with the pallor of death – a death which had frozen her face into an expression of unspeakable terror. “Breathe, Snicket, breathe,” a faraway voice urged me, and I did, putting more and more of my strength into taking great gasps that never quite filled my lungs, and as I breathed, I started to remember. Moxie Mallahan, the first friendly person I had met in this town, the reporter who had helped me to understand its history and its present, the associate who had stood by my side in my duels with the Inhumane Society, for better or for worse – and as those images were crushed one by one by the recurring horror of her death-stricken face, I knew that, in the end, it had been for worse. It was that that finally struck me with crushing sadness and guilt, like an abyss pulling me inwards, drawing every part of me in to the realisation of the great abyss that would be at the side of me now, and that, in my own foolish way, I had played my part in creating. I won’t admit that I cried. But it is okay to cry, always. And after I was done crying or not crying, I felt something else, too. Terror, too, such as had stricken Moxie. Terror and rage. I tried to take control of myself, took a deep breath, and hauled myself to my feet. This was a tragedy, and that meant, above all, I had a responsibility to Moxie. How she had been killed… indeed, where and when. I didn’t question why, though. She had finally poked her nose into something too dangerous to settle by simply locking her up. And I didn’t question who. There was just one man in town cruel enough to murder children – a man who had tried to throw me out of a window, who had turned a sword upon me. The same man responsible, directly or indirectly, for three other murders. Hangfire would pay for this. The first step was figuring out how he had gotten Moxie into the cave, and himself out. I still had the torch, and I flashed it around the cave yet again, cringing every time it alighted on Moxie’s body. There had to be some kind of secret passage – a false wall of rock, a shaft in the ceiling… but the walls and ceiling were seamless. I examined every inch of them, and the torchlight didn’t need to be any better to tell me that there was no way of forging a trick door to resemble so completely the natural stone. So had he somehow gotten in and out of the cave through the same entrance as us, slipping past us somehow? But there was a problem with the floor, there. Moxie’s body looked as wet as anyone who’d climbed up to the cave in this rain, and Theodora and I had left footprints – wet marks on the floor, surrounded by a haze of drips from the rest of our clothes. They weren’t truly reliable footprints; they had left no impression and no clear shape, and were blurred by the rest of the puddling water we’d left. But it still didn’t look like there were more than two trails through the cave. Whoever had brought her here had been dry, somehow. Was it possible, then, that Moxie had somehow gotten in here on her own – through the same mysterious method Ellington had used? Thinking about Ellington and Moxie’s dead body in the cave made my stomach lurch, so I focussed on Moxie instead. How had she died? If she’d been killed by, say, a slow-acting poison, that halved the problem – it was just how she got into the cave and then died, rather than how Hangfire had managed to bring her in. It was still an insoluble problem, but I would take anything that made it easier. All I had to do was bend down and take a closer look… My nerve broke. There was no way I could touch Moxie’s body. I took a step back, and looked over to Theodora. She’d been quiet, standing anxiously by as I searched, trying not to look at Moxie’s body but casting yearning looks at the cave mouth instead. I thought maybe the rain had gotten a little thinner. “I need you to help me,” I croaked. “Just… look at her body. See if you can see anything…” Theodora gave me a queasy look. She hadn’t known or liked Moxie, but she was still an adult, and Moxie was still a dead child – the worst kind. But perhaps she saw in me that I wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and she shuffled over and bent down next to the body as I tried to hold the torch straight. She knew how to be respectful, at least, carefully looking over the body without disturbing it, straightening her hat. Checking her throat. She looked up at me, and shook her head. “No marks, Snicket,” she said, standing swiftly and rubbing her wet palms on her wet coat. “No wounds, no blood. But she’s definitely…” Definitely dead. But how, without leaving a mark on her? Poison, perhaps, as I’d first thought… or maybe some kind of electric shock. I glanced aside at the water soaking her as it soaked me. Drowning, maybe. But which? And where? And still I hadn’t the faintest idea of how she had gotten here at all. One thing was for sure, though: There was nothing more I could do up in this cave. I needed help – professional help. Unlike my previous cases, I had barely any clues to go on, no witnesses, nothing. I had a body in a cave and a head full of questions. I needed to find people who could answer those questions – and people with the authority to run down the Inhumane Society. The Officers Mitchum had overlooked a lot in their time as police officers in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and I had questions about how little they had cared to investigate the deaths of Colonel Colophon, Lansbury Van Dyke, and Cotton Haines, once prominent figures in the town – but even they wouldn’t be able to stand by with a child dead. It might seem strange that I would want to bring them in when my investigations so often took place without their knowledge, but this was different. I had never tried to hide an actual crime from them. There was someone else I wouldn’t be able to hide this from, either, though I wished I could. Moxie’s father would have to be told. That would be a burden I couldn’t let anyone else take on. I turned to Theodora. “We’re leaving. The police have to know about this. We’ll just have to risk the chains.” Theodora nodded, and swallowed. Going at last looked better than staying. But I looked back at Moxie’s body first, and I hesitated. Was there something I should do… or could do… Theodora followed my eyes, and shook her head. “I know it feels wrong, Snicket, but… I think we’ll have to leave her,” she said, in a strained voice. “Quite aside from leaving the investigation to the experts, there’s simply no way for us to carry her down. It takes both hands to use the chains.” I nodded in sad understanding, and then paused in sad bafflement. I hadn’t considered that: If Hangfire had brought Moxie up here, how had he managed the chain walk and still carried a body with him? Was there a secret exit, then? Or a secret way of killing somebody from outside the cave… That, like everything else, didn’t bear thinking about. I hurried out of the cave, Theodora trailing as usual. The rain was definitely thinner, but the rocks of the cliffside and metal of the chains were still as rain-slicked as before. At least there were no impossible visions waiting, not this time, though I searched for a sight of any down the bottom of the cliff, where I could make out the first chain curving around the rock to meet the second. Going down had to be easier than going up, I thought, though of course, the path from Wizard’s Hollow also led up before it plummeted down, much like a thrown object, or a child who slips from a dangerous chain on a mountainside. I grabbed at the wet metal and my hand immediately slipped along it an inch. I gritted my teeth, gripped harder, and began to climb, drawing my thoughts away from Moxie’s horrid fate to thoughts of how suicidal the chain walk was. Would it have been too much to ask for someone to have handed out climbing equipment? With practice, though, I was getting better at handling these chains; I was constantly aware of how close I was to slipping, but I remembered where the footholds were, how firmly to hold the chain, which parts of the rock were the most like waterslides. Theodora had clearly picked it up, too, as I felt the chain rattling behind me from where she was right on my heels. Probably it also helped that we were both driven, this time, to get off the chain walk; Theodora was as rattled as the chains, and as for me, in a way I was punishing myself – daring myself to slip and fall. A nasty part of me that was nonetheless too close to my heart told me I deserved it. But maybe being reckless was actually part of the official advice for how to handle the chain walk, as without so much cautious hesitation, Theodora and I found ourselves past the fourth chain, the one leading out of Wizard’s Hollow, and onto the third that led across the cliff face in what felt like only a few minutes – though I had no way of measuring the time, and indeed it might have come in handy later. The third chain was the easiest, and I even chanced a look back at Theodora, struggling along beside me, and felt that maybe to fight back and win. I paused at the ledge halfway through the chain walk, took a few deep breaths, and reached down to the second chain. There was no second chain. I had to blink a few times and rub the water from my eyes before I could be sure what I was seeing, and sure that I wasn’t in a dreadful nightmare. Though the path was perfectly visible – and perfectly impassable – there was no silver lining leading its way down. Right at the top of where the chain should have been, the ring that fixed the end of the chain firmly into the cliff wall remained, but nothing was attached to it. It was as if the chain had simply vanished, and I grabbed at the air to make sure it hadn’t simply become invisible. An invisibility spell. Spells of the four elements. Nonsense – but someone in town had made it their business to make all the nonsense and all the myths come true. After all, it wouldn’t be too hard to make a chain disappear from its mooring – not for the person who had performed all the other obscene wizardry around Wizard’s Hollow that morning. Of course, it did leave the same old problem, a problem that shouldn’t have just been mine and Theodora’s: There was now no way down the cliff any more. We were marooned dozens of feet from the ground with nowhere to go except back to Wizard’s Hollow, and the same should have been true of whoever had tampered with this chain. But nobody had passed us, on the chains or in the cave – and though I looked up and strained my eyes to see if there was any safe passage I could have missed, I didn’t see anything I would have risked. Approaching the ridge from the back wouldn’t have made any difference, either; I had been granted a distant view of the ridge from above as the car had left the edge of town, and though it sloped less steeply from the very top, where the viaduct footing had been embedded deep in the rock, beyond that it dropped away, such that walking up had looked quite impossible without yet another chain walk. The shadow of the viaduct dominated the ridge. Could there have been some kind of passageway, perhaps, in the other side of the viaduct’s enormous leg? I didn’t think they worked that way, and I had been in the long tunnel beneath the viaduct’s rail before and seen no hatches that could have led down to such a passageway. I didn’t buy that a person would abseil from the viaduct, either – and parachutes or flying machines were no more reasonable than magic… Theodora had reached the end of the chain, and was staring aghast at the missing links. Her expression was one of total despair, and if I sound calm now, I certainly didn’t then. We were still in a dangerously precarious position up there, midway along the chain walk, and we both knew that there was only one place to go now. “Somebody’s playing an evil game with us, Snicket,” Theodora said hoarsely. “Back and forth to that cave…” I nodded. “But there’s only one way to be sure,” I said, grimly. “We have to return to Wizard’s Hollow. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find something else waiting for us. Let’s at least not make it easy for them.” She nodded, gave a last nauseous look at the impossible pass, and started back along the third chain, back to Wizard’s Hollow. Resigned to rain and damp now, we dragged ourselves along no quicker than safety demanded. We’d already passed probably more than an hour out there. I didn’t dare to imagine what more could be happening behind my back. This last disappointment, and the accumulating effort of having effectively done the entire length of chain walk twice, dragging our heavy wet clothes along with us, exhausted us on the last stretch. Even the chains seemed to be giving out, for as I was reaching the end of the fourth chain I heard the faintest hint of a mere moment of a grating noise coming from the ring that fixed it to the rock. Maybe I imagined it twisting a fraction of an inch, but I released the chain as soon as I could and was not keen to venture upon it again. All in all, I almost felt glad to be able to collapse into the mouth of Wizard’s Hollow – but the thought of how a friend had met such a terrible fate there had poisoned all victories. It was a small mercy that, of course, no terrible masked figure of evil intent had emerged from the depths of the cave before our eyes. That would have been impossible, of course, but so was everything else. “Any ideas, Snicket?” Theodora sighed, after we had rested a little. “No good ones yet,” I confessed. “Even if we waited until the whole cliff face had dried out, we couldn’t try to slide down the cliff – it’d just be a slightly shorter fall to break slightly fewer bones. There’s no way of climbing up or down now, not without a chain or some kind of rope.” I eyed her hair, dripping and rope-like, and considered asking her if, like the fairy-tale character, she had enough to coil into a long rope to let me down to the ground. “There might be one thing, though,” Theodora suggested. “The Feint girl’s method – a way of getting down the cliff without using the chain walk.” She eyed the black depths of the cave beyond with a grimace. “A secret passage, you say?” So you’re interested in my theories now, I thought. “I suppose we have all the time in the world now,” I shrugged. “But… there’s still…” We both looked to the back of the cave, now, to what remained there, unspoken. Moxie Mallahan – her remains. Thinking of us creeping around her, pawing at the walls and trying to pretend she wasn’t there, made me quite sick. On the other hand, there had to be some clue, some giveaway that I had missed… I picked myself up off the floor, shook the water from my sleeves, and pulled the torch from my pocket. I could try to take a closer look at Moxie myself, and leave Theodora to check for secret passageways, though it seemed inevitable that neither of us would find anything, and indeed we would not have found anything. But to simply do nothing would be an insult to what Moxie had stood for in her life – and me. I groaned, and flicked on the torch, waving it at ahead of me as I took a few steps towards the back of the cave. “Well,” I began, “at least this still works –” I stopped mid-sentence. My whole mind stopped mid-sentence. Everything seemed to stop. I was so utterly flabbergasted by what I saw, or what I thought I saw, that the entire world seemed to slow down and freeze into a single, unmoving moment that my mind had halted on, brought to a complete stop by the impossible and the insane. A few moments ago I had believed that I was jaded with impossibilities and mysteries forever; that any number of magical things could occur without me possibly being able to care. But once again, my imagination had been absolutely defied by a problem I had simply never anticipated, even though it was the same problem I had faced over and over again that day, even in that cave. The problem was nothing, and I felt that same nothingness in my heart as I unconsciously approached the terminus of the cave to be sure, absolutely sure, that I wasn’t overlooking anything or making some kind of dreadful mistake. At the far end of the cave was a long, damp puddle, with nothing in it. Moxie Mallahan’s body had disappeared without a trace. I was shaken awake by a strong grip on my arm – Theodora, seizing me and pulling me in what became a staggering run back to the mouth of the cave, back as far away as we could get from that abyss in which things appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason, and in a few seconds we were back on the ledge just outside the cave, gasping back the breaths we hadn’t taken as a few final raindrops pattered upon our heads. My body had been exhausted before, but now my mind was exhausted, numbed of feeling. It was the kind of exhaustion that grasps for any conclusion, no matter how insane, and that is my only excuse for my having turned to Theodora, and asked, with what must have been one of the most haggard and stricken expressions I would ever wear, the wrong question – the final wrong question. The one in the title of this story. I received the same answer I had received the last time I had asked this question. I had no right to ask for more. “I don’t know,” Theodora replied, looking just as bad as I must have done. “I don’t know if anything we’ve seen this morning has been real. All I know is that I wanted to get out of that cave, as fast as I could – and now I want to do the same with this mountain, and then the same with this town. There’s something horribly wrong with this whole town, Snicket, and if we stay here it will chew us up and swallow us down into its belly.” “We have orders to stay here,” I said. “No, we have orders to stay far away from V.F.D.,” she corrected. “We don’t have to be here to do that. We can run away and hide anywhere – the Hinterlands, the Gulag Archipelago, Peru. They’ll never find us.” “Do you mean the Volunteer Fire Department,” I asked, “or the Inhumane Society?” She shook her head, but it wasn’t a no. It was an “It doesn’t matter,” and I thrust the matter to the back of my mind, thrust everything that had happened to a dark recess I hoped I couldn’t reach, and turned my attention back to the problem at hand. “We can’t go anywhere,” I said, “unless we can get down from this cliff. We’re trapped.” “Then we’ll have to wriggle out of it somehow,” she said, and gave me an appraising look. “Appraising” means “deciding the value of,” and I don’t think she liked what she saw. “My previous apprentice was very good at wriggling out of traps and problems,” she said, making an unwelcome comparison I hadn’t heard in a while. “So go on, Snicket – live up to his example. Get us down from here.” I wondered which of her previous apprentices she meant – I knew of at least two, and I didn’t like the sound of either of them – and whether they’d ever faced a problem quite like this. I looked around and considered my options. “The cave isn’t an option,” I decided. “I don’t know what’s going on in there, and frankly, I don’t know if I want to find out.” “A secret passage was always just too easy,” Theodora said, shrugging gloomily. “Even if the rain dried off, which it won’t for some time,” I continued, looking down the terribly steep crag, “then we can’t hope to climb or even slide down. Even if one of us hung from the ledge by their hands and the other climbed down to their feet and let go, the drop would be severe, and I don’t know what the top person would hang onto.” “That’s out of the question for the same reason the chains are out of the question,” Theodora said, pointing to the ring that anchored the last chain to the stony floor right in front of Wizard’s Hollow. “I had my eyes right on that thing when we last climbed back down here, Snicket, and I saw it squeak loose a fraction – and the rest looked just as bad. They’re falling to pieces, like everything else in this town, and will probably pop out of the ground and go flying off one day.” “I suppose we’re just stuck on this ledge then,” I murmured, but then I looked back at the ring, the last chain clinking gently against it. It was shaped like a hoop, or a question mark, a closed circle at the top leading to a long tail that plunged into the ground, with a faint line of grime showing just above where it met the stone. The area where it dived into the rock looked a little worn away, too, and recessed, perhaps from water seeping into the crack over many years. I stared at it for a while, and then followed along the length of the chain, trailing just above a gently sloping path up the mountain that turned steep at the top, where I could just make out the much higher ring that the far end of the chain connected to. I looked back and forth along this chain a few times, trying to gauge its length, and then I shuffled over to where the chain led out onto the ledge, got down on my hands and knees and peeked down to the ground. Directly below was quite a long drop down to the very beginning of the chain walk, the first links of the first chain glinting faintly, but I followed the path upwards and saw the ledge where the first and second chain met, and where, I now realised, I could see the other end of the second chain trailing down the cliffside from its lower mooring. The ledge, though, was roughly diagonal from us, with a few faint niches in the rock approaching us that looked like an aborted attempt at a quicker path. I looked up and down from this point to the fourth chain, and tried to measure what the curving fourth chain would look like hanging straight down. “What are you peering at, Snicket?” Theodora asked, her footsteps creeping up behind my back. “We’re not jumping down there. The first person will break both legs, and then they’ll break even more when the second person lands on them.” “We’re not jumping down,” I said, and sat back on the ledge. “We’re swinging down. On the chain.” If I couldn’t hear Theodora’s stomach turning, I could certainly see her face draining of blood to the last drop. “You’re not serious, Snicket,” she stuttered, peering down from the high ledge and taking an instinctive step back. “Very, I’m afraid to say,” I admitted. “The chain’s last ring is already coming a little loose at the bottom here. It’ll be hard work prying it up, but from there we can grab onto the chain and swing along the face of the cliff.” I jabbed my thumb upwards. “If you look, you can see that the top end of the chain is directly above a couple of steps down to the first chain. Once the chain is loose and hangs straight down, we can climb down to the bottom and it’ll drop us right onto those steps – hopefully with enough slack to hold onto it for safety until we get back to the secure chains. And from there we just take the first chain down to the bottom.” Theodora glanced at the chain with all the trepidation that, in fairness, I was trying not to show. “We’re not heroes from the cinema matinée, Snicket,” she said. “We’re not indestructible. You do realise this has a very good chance of killing us.” “And we could die up here,” I wearily explained. “If nobody ever comes to find us up here, we could die of starvation – dehydration, if it goes a few days without raining.” I thought of the strange gouge in the road I had encountered with the Mitchums, and the Swinster Pharmacy’s worrying disappearance… and whatever mysterious fate had befallen Moxie in Wizard’s Hollow. “Or worse.” Theodora wore the face of someone stubbornly struggling against the inevitable and losing, like a survivor on a sinking boat. Then, with a tremendous groan, she sunk to her knees. “Alright,” she whispered. “Tell me what to do, Snicket.” There was only one rock-hard impediment to the plan: The rock in which the vital chain was firmly embedded. We got to work to work it free, trying to twist the hoop by pulling it, or putting the chain from the comparatively safe direction of the cave. Theodora even sacrificed a few nails trying to scrape away at the edge where the stone touched the metal, and my own I clawed almost raw. It was hard labour worthy of a prisoner, and it paid off. Eventually we were able to twist the hoop more, and more, until with a certain amount of wriggling and strenuous heaving the two of us managed to pull it free, scrabbling to hold onto it as we fell back on the ledge. The shape left in my hands was something like a long-handled magnifying glass, its tail adorned with a somewhat blunt spike and sides covered with scratches inflicted by the rock. It didn’t occur to me at the time, so relieved were we to have succeeded, but though it was back-breaking work, it actually didn’t take all that long. It didn’t speak well of the safety of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s coastal walks, but with another chain gone altogether, I didn’t think that vandalising this one was too great a crime. It didn’t seem like anybody would ever be using the chain walk again anyway. I stretched out the chain on the ledge, trying to pull it straight from its anchor high above. It looked like it was long enough. It looked like it just might be… “So,” Theodora coughed. “How are we supposed to do this?” I looked up at the angle of the chain, the slight amount of slack there was if I held it by the ledge. “We have to swing with it as straight as possible,” I said. “Our jump has to be a curve. If we just jump off the ledge, we’ll fall a little.” I took a section of the chain, shook it as dry as I could, and brought Theodora to the ledge. “Hold on to it here like your life depends on it.” “It does,” she reminded me, more forcefully than I think was needed. I’d be jumping from a little higher up, for the angle to be right. Theodora would be lower down the chain than me when we swung out; it might have been better to have the heavier person at the top than at the bottom, but I thought it was better off that way for when we climbed down. Also, if Theodora were at the top of the chain when we swung out, and she fell down, she would probably knock me down on the way. One of us at least should survive this. The steps weren’t exactly dry, which was good, as the chain wasn’t exactly secure. But both were getting drier. My clothes were just wet enough to feel particularly horrible. Holding onto the chain for dear life, and knowing that we’d be jumping slightly ahead of schedule if I were to slip, I delicately made my way up about a third of the way along the chain. Then I took as many deep breaths as I felt comfortable with. No going back now. “When you go, try to step off gently, and brake with your clothes against the cliff wall,” I called to Theodora. “We want to swing as slowly as possible. Remember, where we need to be is just pointing straight down.” She nodded, and gripped her end of the chain a little tighter. Shuffled to the very edge of the cliff, at the corner between the ledge and the path. “Ready?” I called. “No.” “Set?” “No!” “Go,” I said, as, holding the chain as straight and tight as I could, I let myself slip sideways off the ledge. For a brief moment I drifted smoothly, and then a jerk along the chain shook me wildly about, and then the chain twisted and me with it and I was knocked and bashed and grazed about the cliff face feeling like dough under a rolling pin being dragged through a hedge backwards, and then I felt one of my hands slip from the chain and scrambled to find it again while my other held on and on until I felt like my joints would burst through my skin, and then the whole experience was repeated backwards, but slower, and then forwards and slower again, and then finally the chain was hanging straight and something like still. I was beat up nearly as badly as I had been by Stew Mitchum one time. I was battered and covered in bruises and cuts. I strongly suspected that my clothes were torn in places. Somehow, my hat had remained pulled down firm on my head, and like it, I had survived the experience. I looked down. A little way below me was Theodora, moulded to the chain as if it had grown through her over many years. She looked up at me, and she looked as bad as I felt. The feeling was almost certainly mutual. We were alive, though. Alive, and Moxie was not. The links of the chain made climbing down relatively easy, and though the few steps down to the proper path were precarious, we managed them, and after that it was a comparatively simple process to walk back along the first chain to the bottom of the cliff. It is easy if you know how. Theodora’s roadster was waiting for us at the bottom. It felt like a million years since we had last seen it. A great deal had changed, but the seats were still reassuringly uncomfortable. We threw ourselves into those seats and just sat there for a few minutes, drained as the sea that once would have surrounded us. “I think I can safely say,” Theodora said at last, “that that was the worst experience of my entire life.” I thought of Moxie, and I agreed. Everything that had happened, every moment, was awful beyond belief, compounded by the fact that so much of it was literally unbelievable. “What just happened up there, Snicket?” Theodora continued, her voice beginning to crack and grow wild. “What was the point of anything that happened up on that awful abandoned cliffside?” “I can’t even begin to imagine half of it,” I croaked, heaving my body out of a slump with a tremendous effort. “But I think that somebody wanted very badly for us to be stuck in that cave for a long time. That they had some point to prove. And…” My weary eyes strained for a shape in the murky distance. There, up a winding road to a clifftop on the edge of town. The Stain’d lighthouse. “…I think the rules have changed,” I concluded. “And now I don’t know what will happen.” But I did know, quietly, what it might be; I had a suspicion – or not a suspicion, but rather a deep and terrible fear that gripped my soul. A fear that, whatever happened, things would get worse from here. Much, much worse. Theodora twisted the key to turn on her car, but neither of us heard the engine growl, for another sound rang out over it, its reverberating note carrying from far overhead, like a harbinger. It was closer than I had heard it in some time, that sound, for I was now closer than I had been in a while to the red walls of Wade Academy, and the spindly tower behind them that housed a single bell that rang, it was said, in times of danger. It tolled, and tolled, and we held our breaths as we waited for it to stop. But even when our wheezing lungs gave out and could wait no longer, still the tolling had not stopped. It rang on, and did not stop.
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Post by Teleram on Nov 13, 2015 20:28:49 GMT -5
I just finished Chapter 4, and it's pretty intriguing. The storyline is a little muddled, but it's very inventive and the tone reminds me of Stephen King for some reason.. Which diagonal line from ?1 are you referring to?
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Post by Dante on Nov 14, 2015 3:41:17 GMT -5
I just finished Chapter 4, and it's pretty intriguing. The storyline is a little muddled, but it's very inventive and the tone reminds me of Stephen King for some reason.. Well, it only really gets started around where you've left off. It's a slower-burn opening than previous volumes, but there was more I wanted to set up... and couldn't resist overwriting, either. The hawser in the lower-right panel of ?1's cover provoked much debate because at the time nobody knew what it was, The cover art style meant that it was just depicted as a line. It honestly looked more like a mistake, out of context.
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Post by Dante on Nov 15, 2015 5:28:10 GMT -5
CHAPTER SIX “It’s the final alarm,” Theodora said, eyes widening as the bell continued to ring on and on, always just below the level of what she had to say and making it that bit harder to concentrate. “We need to grab our things from the Lost Arms and escape the town as soon as possible!” She spun the steering wheel around like a valve on a flooding pipe, and with her foot on the accelerator brought the car around in a tight circle that gave me a heart-stoppingly close view of the steep incline beside the road before we started bouncing straight along and back towards the town. “How many minutes have passed already, Snicket?” she demanded as I scrabbled for my seatbelt. “We only have a hundred and seventy until –” “Until who knows!” I interrupted. “It won’t be a saltstorm or anything of the sort. I went reading up on the scare stories about salt lung long ago. There’s no such thing!” Theodora took her eyes off the road to turn them on me, and I pushed her head back. “So what are you suggesting, Snicket?” she asked, swatting my hand away. “You don’t think the Octopus Council and the Coast Guard would lie to us, do you?” “What octopus? What coast?” I threw up my hands. Just how far out of the loop was she? “I’ve never seen hide nor hair of either organisation. They’re just fronts for the Inhumane Society, and the last step of their plan is getting everybody out of town. We need to be prepared for what happens when they have Stain’d-by-the-Sea to themselves.” “That sounds like all the more reason to be out of town when this happens,” Theodora argued, as the car jolted over a particularly nasty bump. “Do you have any kind of a plan, Snicket?” The lighthouse was growing clearer in the murky distance as we got closer and closer to the town, and I looked angrily away from it. A plan? I had no plan because I had no clue. Hangfire had some kind of grand scheme in play, but I had no idea what it was other than that it involved the whole town. Moxie had been murdered, so she must have gotten too close to the truth – but how? The last I had heard of her she had been attempting to retrieve the Bombinating Beast. But the Beast’s lair had utterly vanished, and I don’t know if she ever got there. I looked back at the lighthouse. Her father might know more. He didn’t usually, but from what Theodora said, Moxie had been going to take him into her confidence – and of course, I had to tell him what had happened… But for all I knew, he might have been missing, too – gone the same way as Moxie. The lighthouse would have to be the first port of call on my investigation nonetheless. But in the present circumstances I had to gather the rest of my associates together first, to handle this as a team. This concerned all of us, and they must all have been quite alarmed by the final alarm. I’d have to gather them together as soon as possible, and we would then proceed to the lighthouse to try and locate Mr. Mallahan. That was my plan, then, and we would take it from there. We had nearly three hours, or a little less, now. Surely it would be enough to get a grasp on Hangfire’s scheme before the deadline. But before I could tell that to Theodora, she saw something ahead on the road that made us literally draw up. After all, it wasn’t as if we could proceed. A large van was pulling to a stop on the junction ahead of us, where the road from Wizard’s Hollow met one of the roads joining the town and the drained valley. Faded letters printed on the side of the van read PARTIAL FOODS, and indeed it was the proprietor, Polly Partial, who was running in our direction, waving her arms frantically. Theodora and I tossed a puzzled glance between ourselves as she approached, but neither of us could do anything with it. Polly Partial was a grocer. She wasn’t the sort of person who should have been blocking the road back into town to wave down private investigators. “Oh, it’s you,” Polly Partial said, squinting through the window as Theodora made an effort to wind it down. I assume she hadn’t noticed me, as Theodora’s hair was drying out and was slowly filling the front seat. “I didn’t know who to tell, so I just decided to wave down the first person I saw, and it was the perfect person for the job.” “What is the job?” asked Theodora. “I don’t know exactly,” Polly Partial said. “But I don’t know exactly what your job is either. You came and asked me some suspicious questions once, so I assume you’re interested in suspicious things, and I have seen the most suspicious thing of all. Something terribly strange has happened, and even if the authorities can’t do anything about it now, somebody should look into it for when we’re ready to return from the evacuation.” I tugged on one of Theodora’s ubiquitous locks of hair to attract her attention, just as Polly Partial’s story had caught my own interest. “Let me take care of this,” I whispered, as she turned to me for a conference. “This could well be the clue I’ve been waiting for. Right now I have no idea what Hangfire is planning, but he has to have shown his hand somewhere. I’ll see what Polly Partial has to say and then get a ride with her back into town. You go round up The Association Of Associates and bring them to meet me at…” I looked to the town for inspiration, and saw the only place that made sense. “At the lighthouse,” I said, though it cost me a grimace. Theodora nodded. It saved her the trouble of admitting that she wasn’t actually very good at investigating things. As I got out, I heard her telling Polly Partial that “I’ve asked my apprentice to look into this on my behalf while I take care of some important business. Don’t worry, he’s very capable.” Polly Partial looked at me over the roof of the roadster, squinting, or maybe frowning. “Have we met?” she asked. Several times, but rather than embarrass both of us, I said instead, “Thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Could you please escort me to the scene of the crime?” She purred approvingly, leaving me quite sure she would never remember the time I had stolen two honeydew melons specifically to prove that she was an unreliable witness, and ushered me over to her van. Once we were inside the cab, she reversed down the lane and then set off into the valley, and I saw in the wing mirror that Theodora in turn was driving off up the road into town, hopefully to find Pip, Squeak, Jake, and Cleo. I looked back to Polly Partial, and noticed her hands getting tense on the wheel as we got closer to the valley floor. “Why don’t you explain along the way?” I suggested. “That way, we won’t have to spend more time than necessary at our destination.” She nodded gratefully, and began to speak. “Do you know where this road leads, suspicious apprentice?” she asked, and when I introduced myself and said I did not, she went on, “It leads to one of Ink Inc.’s inking sites, though of course it’s disused now. Industrial syringes would go plunging into octopus nests in crevices in the earth, scare the ink out of them, and suck it all up in the syringe, then deposit it in huge vats which were extracted into tanker vans and driven to the processing plant. Ink Inc. gave a presentation to pretty much the whole town explaining how the system would work back when the proposal for draining the sea came in, so just about everyone in town knows this, even if you wouldn’t. And since everyone knows it, everyone also knows that Ink Inc. closed down suddenly enough that there was probably still some ink left in those vats. So now and again, it’s rumoured that people drive down to the inkwells to –” She stopped mid-sentence, and started to look a bit flustered instead, as if someone had taken a feather duster to her face while she was driving. I think I understood her dilemma. There are not many ways to make money in a fading town, and even fewer you can talk about openly. “They drive down to siphon off some of the remaining ink,” I filled in for her, which seemed obvious enough, and added, “and you were curious if that was really possible, so you just came down for a look,” which was neither obvious nor true but was the tactful thing to say. “Right, I just wanted a look,” Polly Partial picked up, looking relieved. “I didn’t know when the final alarm would be going off, obviously, so I figured there was still time to look around. Anyway, as I turned down this road I saw a car ahead of me. Don’t ask me what kind of car it was, by the way, as it was quite a way in front of me, and I’m not good with cars.” The real thing she wasn’t good with was eyesight, though it did make me a little worried that she was still allowed to drive. I knew from personal experience that Polly Partial’s vision was pretty bad, and having her as a witness to a suspicious incident did not fill me with confidence. But I could live with it. It wasn’t the worst tragedy to happen that day. What I had already seen was so much worse than anything else I had experienced that I could have lived with a lot, and indeed I would have lived with much worse if it would somehow have made that first tragedy disappear. I tried to thrust these thoughts from my head as Polly Partial continued her explanation. “I could tell it was going to the same place as me,” she was saying, “as from here, this road doesn’t go anywhere else except the open valley, and nobody has any reason to go there. But I figured it was fine so long as we didn’t get in each other’s way. As we go around this corner you should be able to see where we were going.” We turned around one of the shelves of rock that descended from Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s coast, and the scene was laid out before me. Rising up ahead out of a broad square of level valley floor was one of Ink Inc.’s syringe derricks, a tall and heavy platform on which was mounted an industrial-size syringe, made of glass stained with black lines from years of being filled and emptied of ink, and with a long and pointed needle big enough to make an elephant wince. The needle was presently in a neutral position, retracted a way back from a dark hole in the ground that I presumed was the inkwell itself, but could be controlled from somewhere I could not see to either plunge forwards into that hole, or to swivel backwards to deposit its oily extract into either of two tall vats that stood a little way in the opposite direction. Between the derrick and the vats was a surprisingly sturdy-looking wooden fence, around my height, which is to say about five feet tall, and this fence formed a large, roughly rectangular border around the syringe and inkwell to about the size where a large vehicle could fit between the fence and the syringe or inkwell on three sides – and it looks like they probably had to on a fairly regular basis, as the ground all around was a churned-up mess of years of wheel ruts, filled with brown and occasionally blackish water, leading from a wide open gate in the fence just left of the syringe and the vats. A muddy border born of similar disturbances surrounded the fence on all four sides, where trucks and other vehicles had been driving around the site, picking up vats and depositing workers or vice-versa. We were approaching the scene from the left side, heading for the bottom edge of the border, past where the vats stood; a lone outbuilding stood by the upper-left corner of the muddy border, another at the bottom-right, and there were some more disused-looking buildings off to the right of the whole arrangement that I didn’t think were particularly important. Polly Partial kept taking nervous glances in the direction of the inkwell as we drove past, giving a wide berth to the fence and the vats as she approached the outbuilding in the lower-right. I noticed that she appeared to be roughly following a recent-looking set of wheel ruts that took a similar route, probably her own from earlier, and they led her straight into the lower-right outbuilding, a gloomy little storage hut where she narrowly avoided knocking down some old barrels like skittles and nearly drove through the back wall, and her sudden braking left me very glad to be getting out for a while. The ever-present tolling of the distant bell was a little fainter in here, but the respite only served to remind me of how irritating and distracting it was. Was that, too, part of Hangfire’s plan? “So, here’s where I stopped before,” Polly Partial explained, as we climbed out of the van. “Just out of sight, in this conveniently open storage building, in case anyone saw me and… got the wrong impression. I guess the other car felt the same way, as they turned off and headed up the left side of the fence and I guess wound up in that other outbuilding over there.” She pointed in the general direction of that other outbuilding, at the opposite corner of the muddy square from us. The doors to that building were closed, though; the car’s driver must have shut the door behind them. They didn’t want to be observed. “Anyway, what they were up to was none of my business, and vice-versa,” Polly said, as she led me to the edge of the mud in the area’s bottom-right corner, just outside the outbuilding, “and once I got out from under that roof, I was more concerned with watching my step in the mud – not having brought proper footwear, since I hadn’t anticipated the weather. I’ve no idea what happened to that car after that, or if it has any bearing on what I saw next, when I was walking out to the abandoned vats in my second-best business shoes.” She pointed out along the lower side of the muddy square we had just driven along, and among the criss-crossing wheel ruts, somewhat overcut by our own most recent set, was a set of deep, featureless recesses in the mud, alternating left and right as they toddled indistinctly in the direction of the empty vats. From where we stood, the vats blocked my view of the gate at the left end of the bottom side of the fence, but I could tell that the remains of the footsteps, which mostly ran between Polly Partial’s oldest set of wheel ruts, were moving obliquely outwards to the front of the vats, from which emerged some protruding pipes with circular valve handles. Again, I chose not to question what Polly Partial intended to do with those industrial-size taps, nor what kind of container she had brought along to catch whatever didn’t come out of those taps after she didn’t open the valves. I was more interested in why the tracks stopped just in front of the vats and hurried, with a broader stride and considerably more splatter, in a straight line back the way they had come, and I asked about them, since Polly herself seemed to have gone quiet. “Well, isn’t it obvious?” she answered, plainly agitated. “I walked out there, slowly and carefully, to – well, I walked out there. And it was just as I was halfway between the furthest and nearest I had to turn and run, because… I saw it. I saw a thing so horrible and terrifying that I ran for my life back to the van without even thinking how badly my clothes would get splattered with this filthy ink-stained mud.” I don’t have much patience for cliffhangers, especially not with damp clothes and a bell ringing through my head. “And that thing was…?” Polly Partial looked nervously around, as if whatever she was afraid of might be waiting to jump out at her the moment she spoke its name. Finally, she leaned towards me, one hand covering the side of her mouth in case the mysterious sight could lip-read. “The Bombinating Beast,” she whispered to me. The Bombinating Beast – the fearsome, mythical predator that had stalked Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s coast in days gone by… were it not for that important word, “mythical.” Jet-black, buzzing sea serpents do not stalk crime scenes, especially not those which aren’t in the sea. I told myself this, just as I told myself that nobody could fly up and down cliffs and turn bodies invisible and intangible. I also told myself that Polly Partial’s eyesight was terrible. She could have seen a black lawnmower. A black lawnmower right next to a pitch-black crevice at the bottom of a drained sea. It still beat a mythical sea monster. “Could you describe the Bombinating Beast for me?” I asked. “What did it look like, and what did it do?” She looked at her shoes, and I followed suit. They were pretty much coated in mud, along with her legs. I looked at my shoes, and warned them that they would be joining hers soon. “Come out to where I stood, and I’ll show you,” she said, and went splashing out, trying to avoid the watery pools where rainwater had filled her tire tracks and footprints. It wasn’t easy, which is another way of saying it wasn’t possible, as I found out a moment later. Maybe I should have sent Theodora for a change of clothes, I thought. Or maybe I could just go to Moxie’s place to dry off and think things over… A vision of a dark, damp cave flashed in front of my eyes, and I shook my head. No, Snicket. Rain and mud are nothing. Don’t complain about trifles when other people have suffered more than you. I waded out, daring the water to splash higher, stain deeper. “This is it,” Polly said, stomping to a halt just next to where her previous set of footprints became a muddled backwards turn. To my right were the two large vats that once contained inky water, and I could just make out the open gates in the fence at an oblique angle ahead and to my right, blocked slightly by the edge of the leftmost vat. “It just… lurched out from behind the fence,” she said, gesturing to where the muddy alley led behind the fence and upwards in the direction of the outbuilding the other car had driven to. “Oh, it was horrible – all wriggling and dragging itself along, with its long tail and everything! I nearly fainted before I ran away, but I guess it can’t see things that stand still, as it ignored me. It just turned its huge head into the gatehole and started heaving itself up that way, and that’s when I ran. Fortunately it didn’t follow me, so I guess it kept going the way it was going.” I’d heard this story before, I realised – seen it before, even. A mysterious black serpent, dimly-seen, drags its way through some abandoned place… This was a prank that somebody had pulled on me, once, in the first of the Stain’d Myth Murders, and if you don’t want to know how that trick worked, I advise that you don’t read the first of my additional accounts of wrong questions or any of the following pages of this account of a wrong question. While you’re at it, you might be better off not reading anything else I have written, either. The only person who has to live with my mistakes is me. “Did the Bombinating Beast look like a roll of carpet wrapped in a black garbage bag, pulled by a wire that was reeled in using an electric motor?” I asked, a question that was too long to serve as the title of this work, wrong though it may have been. Polly Partial looked incredulous. “What are you talking about, Snicket kid? Do you think I’m stupid or something?” she asked, looking at me like she thought I was. “A carpet on a motorised wire? Kid, there wasn’t any sound of a motor. This thing moved like a living being. And to top it off, it was nearly five feet tall!” “Five feet tall!” I try to avoid the habit of repeating what other people have just told me in surprise, but sometimes you really are so surprised by something that you don’t think about what you are saying at all. “But how…” “You mean how did I know its height, right?” she asked, looking faintly smug, though in fact I was wondering how on earth somebody had faked it. A dark memory stirred in the back of my mind – a dark memory of a dark pond on a dark night, where something stirred, splashed, burst from deep waters with a dreadful, throbbing roar… But… “One other thing first,” I tried again. “Did it bombinate?” The grocer frowned. “No,” she muttered. “Maybe it wasn’t hungry. Maybe its buzzing noise is actually just its stomach rumbling. In future maybe I should carry around some groceries to bait it away.” She looked troubled, so I remembered to ask instead, “So how did you know its height, then?” She pointed at the fence. “Why, it was so simple that even an apprentice like you could’ve done it. That fence is about five feet tall, and the Bombinating Beast was nearly as high. So it must be about five feet high! And about the same across, naturally.” “Naturally,” I repeated, though in fact I was trying to picture it. Just what had Polly Partial seen? It wasn’t some kind of contraption being pulled along. It wasn’t a car, either, not without the sound of an engine. Its height clearly wasn’t five feet, at least, but probably wasn’t less than half that either, which was a bit more promising – but if it was just as wide across… As the silence drew out, I realised that Polly Partial was giving me an increasingly expectant look. “Well?” she asked. “Are you going to investigate, or are we going to stand in the mud all day? The saltstorm will be here in not much more than two hours now, and I want to be out of here, and so should you.” “I’m sorry,” I said, although an important part of any investigation is trying to understand what happened. I looked over at the ground where Polly Partial had indicated. I could see even without getting any closer that there didn’t appear to be any huge furrow in the earth such as a Bombinating Beast or anything like it would have left, just more old wheel ruts spilling over with dark water. And yet Polly Partial had clearly seen something. This was clearly going to be very complicated. “Before I examine the scene,” I said, “is there anything more you can tell me?” “Oh, absolutely,” she nodded. “This is only half the story. Follow me, and I’ll tell you about how I saw the man.” A man! Hangfire – but wait, surely Hangfire must have been lurking about Wizard’s Hollow while I was trapped in the cave. Surely he couldn’t have been at this inkwell several miles away at the same time? One of his associates, perhaps – Dr. Flammarion, or a woman in an overcoat and hat, which would probably look about the same to Polly Partial. I ran through Hangfire’s known comrades as Polly Partial led me back through the mud and over to her van, where she had fled from the Beast earlier in the day. Hangfire himself, powerfully-built and masked even when showing his face; Dr. Flammarion, a portly little man with a nasty smile even Polly Partial couldn’t miss; Nurse Dander, a tall woman made even taller by the hair coiled up atop her head; Sharon Haines, smartly-dressed and sour as the lime pin she always seemed to wear… “You see, after I got back to the van, I got a bit paranoid,” Polly Partial was saying, as we reached the outbuilding again. “What was the Bombinating Beast doing now? If I drove straight back out, would it be waiting in the gatehole to pounce on my van? So I decided to take a chance. I’d sneak up the side of the fence and peek over, and see where it was, and then I’d decide what to do next.” In the mud her shoes had left shoe-shaped holes, but on the surrounding earth they left little piles of damp mud that showed where she had gone. I followed her up the right edge of the muddy square to a bit more than halfway up the fence. I could see the great inking syringe in profile, its deadly needle pointing safely straight down at the ground, away from the inkwell and anyone else it could point threateningly at, but it still reminded me too much of hospitals, of syringes filling up with a person’s red blood rather than the black blood of the inky sea. Polly’s old footsteps turned back over the muddy road and clearly crossed almost straight to the fence, at a point maybe midway between the syringe and where I thought the inkwell should have been. “This seemed like a safe enough spot,” Polly explained, as she pointed across the road. She seemed reluctant to cross the mud again, and not just because we were dirty enough already. “But because the fence is about the same height as me, I couldn’t see anything over it unless I got closer. I thought from there I could just peek over the top and see what was going on inside. Well, I couldn’t see as much as I hoped, but I did see one good thing, as well as one strange thing.” She squinted at me, and then at the fence. “You’re a bit short to see right over, but if you go over to that fence and jump, you should get an idea of what it was like for me. Hurry up now.” I would have done it myself, but having Polly Partial order me about didn’t make the prospect any more appealing. Nonetheless I braved the mud again, reminded that you can never be so wet and muddy that you stop caring if you get more wet and muddy, and got to the fence, which was about level with my hat. It was a little difficult to jump in the mud, but I only needed to jump a little, to get to Polly Partial’s eye height, and I think I managed it. It wasn’t a very satisfying view. The ground was so level that I could only really see straight across to the top of the fence on the opposite side of the stretch of ground around the inkwell. I couldn’t even see the ground itself, much less the well. “You can’t see the floor, can you?” called Polly Partial. “Neither could I, but I didn’t need to. From there I could see everything I wanted.” “And what was that?” I asked, as I waded back to her. She could have just told me, but that would be too easy. I could say the same thing about any number of people in town and in this case. “I saw the Bombinating Beast,” she said, “going in the opposite direction. It leapt over that far fence, like a waterfall or spilt ink, and I didn’t see it again. I guess it went back where it came from, thank goodness, and with any luck it’ll stay there and get saltstormed back to extinction.” Several feet high and wide, and yet it could jump over a five-foot fence? My mind flashed back to that dreadful night at the Wade Academy’s fire pond… Was it finally old enough, that horrible thing? Old enough to roam free – old enough to prey on anything it liked…? “And at about the same time,” Polly continued, “a man appeared.” I switched tracks with enthusiasm. “What do you mean by ‘appeared’?” I asked. “Where, and what did he look like?” “Let a person finish!” she snapped. “What I mean is he just seemed to pop up right by the inkwell. One moment there was nothing, the next he was there. And then the next he was gone again, so I didn’t get a good look. I guess…” She thought to herself. “He was tall – taller than the fences by quite a bit. Wearing an overcoat, I think, but there wasn’t much time to look.” She squinted at me again. “Kind of weird hair. A bit like yours. I don’t like these modern hairstyles young people have today. Just look at where it got that librarian.” I patted my head. “This is a hat,” I said. “Hair, clothes, it’s all the same thing,” she said, a statement I am truly glad she did not really believe. “All I know is, if it was good enough in my day, I don’t know why it’s not good enough now. Anyway, that’s everything I saw, and after that I just left. Can we go now?” “Hold on,” I said quickly. That may have been all she saw, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly. “I have to look around to find out more. Will you wait for me?” “Say the magic word,” she said. I begrudgingly showed her some common courtesy and she begrudgingly showed it me back. “Make it quick,” she scowled. “I’m starting to think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.” She waddled back in the direction of the Partial Foods van, and I stood in thought and mud. I had come here looking for a clue, and instead I had found another mystery. Nothing Polly Partial had told me made sense, I had no idea what it meant, and she probably hadn’t seen most of what she thought she had seen. But something very suspicious had clearly happened here. A car had driven up and been hidden in a warehouse. The Bombinating Beast – or, I hoped, something not very much like it – had crawled from its direction, approached the inkwell, and then hopped over a fence and vanished back the way it had come from. And in the midst of all this, a man had seemingly emerged from the inkwell and just as quickly disappeared… I had long known that the ground beneath Stain’d-by-the-Sea was riddled with passageways of one sort or another – mines, drains, inkwells, maintenance tunnels. Could it be that they were all connected in one labyrinthine underworld, allowing a clever person to travel anywhere around town without being seen? Could Hangfire have emerged here to direct some other aspect of his ghoulish plot? Could there, after all, have been a hidden way to escape from Wizard’s Hollow through the earth itself…? There were two things worth looking at. One was the inkwell, and I thought I could reasonably put that off for a bit. Much easier to get to was the other outbuilding, the one where the car followed by Polly Partial had last been seen. I tramped around the corner and followed the top edge of the fence, noting that the road was no less muddy, but not, apparently, from recent use. Ahead of me, at the corner opposite that where Polly Partial waited, was a small shack of corrugated metal. Two high doors were loosely pulled to. The gloomy atmosphere didn’t make what cracks of the interior I could make out look any less dark. The alarm bell chimed on, every strike a hollow cry on the wind. Maybe this shack is just another kind of pit, I thought. I stalled by satisfying myself that there were no visible Bombinating Beast tracks leading along the road between the shack and the gatehole, just the recent splatter of tire tracks in wet mud, and then there was nothing left to do but remind myself that I couldn’t afford to be afraid. “Get scared later” means get scared when there’s nothing to be scared of any more, whether that’s from the chill of reflecting on all the terrible threats you have encountered, or the terror of an imagined figure in your room as you lie awake at night. Thinking of scary figures in darkened rooms was not really the best way to stop myself from being scared of going into a darkened room, though, so I ignored my mind and its screams of opposition to walk forward and push one of the shack’s doors wide open. The dark room became a dark grey room, filled with dark and dark grey things. Much like the outbuilding Polly had stopped in, barrels and crates were stacked high, rainwater seeping through ragged tarpaulins to speckle them with rust and rot, while tools and hard hats lay discarded in corners. Right in the middle of the room was a big splash of colour with mud on its wheels, and I was so taken aback by what the car Polly Partial had seen was that I forgot about scary figures in darkened rooms entirely. It was a dented yellow vehicle with words printed on the side. The dents made the words hard to read, but I would recognise a Bellerophon Taxi vehicle anywhere. This was where I stopped liking this business at the inkwell, and that was putting it lightly. Seeing this taxi here gave me a very, very bad feeling. It had no business being here. Its owners had no business being here. There shouldn’t even have been any fuel in the tank, as it had run out some time ago, while I was sitting in it, and Pip and Squeak had taken up chauffeuring Cleo Knight instead. Was there another taxi? I’d never seen one, and they’d never mentioned one, and besides, you couldn’t mistake those dents. Someone had gotten this car running again, and then they had driven it down into the valley and hidden it. And then the Bombinating Beast appeared. And then a man had appeared… I took a deep breath, fought the impulse to leave immediately, and walked over to the taxi. I only had eyes for it, though I should have looked around the outbuilding as well. But I wanted to see if anything, or anyone, was still in the taxi. But it was gloomy enough to make it hard to see in. I was reminded unpleasantly of trying to make my way in Wizard’s Hollow, and that reminded me that I still had Theodora’s torch in my pocket. Even the idea of using a torch made me a little bit uncomfortable, because it emphasised the darkness, and also told anyone hiding there exactly where you were. But I needed to see what was going on, even if it was with a light not much brighter than Theodora. I flicked the torch on and waved it at the car windows. They were clear enough to show that nobody was sitting in the car, at least, and that made me feel better about getting closer and tentatively opening the doors to get a look at the seats and footwells. There was nothing there that I didn’t expect to find, though, just a stack of books on the driver’s seat, where Pip had kept them to sit high enough to reach the steering wheel. I didn’t remember if they were the same ones he’d left when the taxi had finally broken down, but I didn’t remember him removing them when the car had finally broken down. It was a big enough stack that it might have taken several trips on foot to return them to the library or wherever their home was. They could have picked them up in the Dilemma, and I would have been surprised if they hadn’t, and yet here they were, as if the taxi had itself been picked up and dropped here like a toy by an enormous person. I shut the doors gently, and the torchlight reminded me of another compartment I could check. Theodora had kept a raincoat and a torch in the trunk of her car. I wondered what the Bellerophons had kept in theirs. I walked round to the back of the taxi and opened it up. There was something, pushed into a corner and held with a belt so it didn’t fall over. It was a crinkled paper bag, and printed on the paper bag were eight letters in big, outlined capitals. SWINSTER, they said, and I remembered Pip and Squeak saying that they’d gone to the pharmacy the previous day to pick up something for their father. It looked like they’d been doing that for a while, and that figured; their father was sick, and the Swinster Pharmacy would have his medicine. I guess they had forgotten about this bag when the car broke down. Perhaps it was unacceptable for me to go poking into their private affairs, but nobody was looking as I looked into the paper bag. It contained a couple of brown bottles, larger than most medicine bottles, and with tall, narrow necks. I took out one of the bottles, the liquid inside gurgling and blooping, and looked at its elaborate and somewhat faded paper label. It depicted a rather tedious octopus character who I gather was one of the town’s less threatening mascots. I could have unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents of the bottle, but I didn’t need to. Even if I could no longer read the words on the faded label, I knew that this wasn’t medicine. I slammed the trunk shut and walked out of the shack. Pip and Squeak had lied to me, but it wasn’t hard to see why. I just wondered if it meant anything, like whether the taxi meant anything. Maybe the taxi, too, had been staged; maybe that wasn’t real. Maybe it was just a clever distraction – but with Polly Partial in on it? Surely not. Not so long ago he had attacked, drugged, and stolen from her. She would never trick me on his behalf, but she might be tricked on his behalf, or she might be threatened. I turned over any answer but the right one as I followed the non-existent Beast tracks back down to the gatehole that led into the inking area. The pointed syringe, the hole in the ground, they waited. My footprints splashed their way through the mud and the criss-crossing wheel ruts, and the closer I got to the inkwell, the blacker the mud and its ever-present puddles and rivulets grew. I would have expected there to have been some kind of guardrail around the inkwell, but this was Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and doubtless the chain walk to Wizard’s Hollow was only a reluctant safety measure. The inkwell was simply an unguarded hole in the ground, and if you weren’t looking where you were going, you would simply walk right into it. Even watching my feet drip closer, I felt like I could slip and tumble in at any second. A stiff breeze caught at my clothes and tried to steal my hat, but I would have preferred a real person to be dragging me away from danger. It was beside the inkwell itself, though, that things started to make some sense. Since the Bombinating Beast had left no trail, I had half-expected Polly Partial’s mysterious appearing and disappearing man to be equally weightless, but between the inkwell and the hanging syringe strange traces remained of a wild and crazy dance. The wheel ruts had been tramped over by a couple of different-sized and messy-looking footprints, their proper size and shape difficult to judge with the mud so damp and the holes so puddled, and these too squashed among some wide and irregular hollows where some heavy objects appeared to have been set down. These imprints lined the edge of the inkwell, within a metre of it, and some of the shapes had worn smooth and skidded grooves over the black edge and into the crevice of the inkwell itself. If this sounds confusing, this is because it was. I couldn’t settle on a single interpretation of the strange marks – how many individuals of what sizes were involved, what strange cargo they had been carrying, certainly not why Polly Partial had only seen one man for one second. I could only describe the markings as signs of a scuffle. Was the battle’s winner the same as Polly Partial’s mysterious Beast-taming man? A few discarded items lay about, resting atop the mud, like items that had slipped from a carelessly-opened suitcase. They weren’t nearly heavy or large enough to account for some of the bigger imprints in the mud, but they might have accounted for a few of the smaller ones. They were scattered irregularly over the remnants of the scuffle as if tossed about at random, and the items were similarly random. In the order I found them, which was no particular order and in no seemingly important place, were: An unlaced shoe that could be worn by a foot somewhat smaller than mine, but just as soaked and muddy as my own; a loosely-tied shoe that could be worn by a foot somewhat larger than mine, its back absolutely slathered with mud while the sole bore only a faint sheen; and the partner of the first shoe, identical except for the opposite foot. What they were doing here I couldn’t imagine. My shoes were so filthy I might as well have not been wearing them, but I still didn’t intend to take them off. There was a fourth item, and this wasn’t a shoe. It was a dark blue cap made of very stiff material, perhaps big enough to be worn by the owner of the bigger shoe, and with words printed on the hatband. They were words I would normally have liked very much, but today I felt the opposite. Those words had no business being here, just as they had had no business being here when I had read the same words a couple of minutes earlier. There was only one place left to investigate – the worst of all. The inkwell. I stood in the thick mud on the inkwell’s edge, and the threatening voice I’d been hearing in my head all day told me that it would be oh so easy for someone to creep up behind me and push me in. I looked over my shoulder. The only comforting thing about the fenced area was that I could see everything going on inside it, which was just a few metres of churned mud on all sides. Nobody could sneak up on anyone here. Then again, Polly Partial hadn’t seen any scuffling in here, either. It was as if the scene had been invaded by an invisible man. Another thought you don’t need, Snicket. I swallowed my disgust and slowly sank to my knees, and then onto my belly, lying flat in the filthy black mud, practically rolling in it. Only my head poked over the edge of the inkwell, empty and black as another cave I had visited recently. I still had the torch. I carefully drew it from my pocket, pointed it into the inkwell, and flicked it on. Ink Inc. had sucked the sea dry, and to follow, it turns out, had sucked its own inkwells dry. The hole, a narrow and stony-sided pit around a metre wide and many more deep, had only rainwater to feed it, and that had not been enough. The protruding rocks of the wall were wet, but the pit itself was dry and empty, save perhaps for an even smaller hole at the very bottom, barely wider than the inking syringes that stabbed into it and certainly too small for any human to fit through, though trickles of dark blood were doing their best to fill it up. I wish I had never seen what lay beside that hole, dashed upon the brutal rocks. A man had indeed fallen down the pit, or been thrown there. He was a short and flabby man, dressed like he hadn’t intended to go out that day, but he looked like he would fit the cap and shoe I had found, and indeed the other shoe that lay near his feet in their worn socks. I could not see his downturned face, but I could see black blood around a nasty crack along the back of his head, and the rest of his body was covered in bloodless wounds and scrapes inflicted on the way down. I didn’t think I had ever seen him before in my life, although I think I could have guessed his name. The man’s body was not the only one lying at the bottom of the pit. A man-sized overcoat had fluttered down into the pit to mostly cover two more bodies, small enough to be mercifully spared from all but partial view. The dimly-traced contortions of their tangled limbs and the blood soaking through the coat told me exactly how they’d died, though it could not tell me why one of them also was without his shoes. The torch slipped from my fingers, and a second later it too was shattered upon the rocks, its whirling light dying at the bottom of the pit. I dragged myself up and staggered aghast through the mud as far from the pit as I could get, far from the leaning gate, far from the steepled syringe and the whole creaking cemetery of the sea. Far from the grave of the Bellerophons.
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Post by Dante on Nov 17, 2015 11:30:48 GMT -5
CHAPTER SEVEN I was in no state to even notice Polly Partial’s reaction when I got back to her van a minute later, wrenching open the door and dumping myself in the passenger seat like a wild dog was snapping at my heels. I imagine, now, that she was probably split between alarm at my alarmed appearance, and disgust at my disgusting appearance – bedraggled, soaked, the front of my suit caked with mud and stained with old ink, horror written in every twist of my face. “What happened?”, I remember her asking. “Were you attacked?” I think I shook my head, or gestured for her to drive away, or made some other indication that I wanted to get out of that awful place and never even think of it again, but even as Polly Partial started up the van and slid her way to the exit and back up to town, what I had seen at the inkwell was all that was on my mind, and seemed like it was all that would ever be. What had happened to Moxie was impossible, but what had happened to Pip and Squeak simply didn’t make sense. Why kill them, let alone the unknown man with them? Why sneak out to the middle of nowhere in their own defunct taxi? What dreadful struggle had taken place at the inkwell, and who had they been fighting against? And just what did the Bombinating Beast have to do with it all? What even was the Bombinating Beast? A question rose unbidden to my mind, a question I had asked when trapped with the mystery of Moxie’s death, and once before, when I had been shown something abominable at the Wade Academy – the only question that could be the title of this story, if I could ever brave committing it to paper. Though it seemed unthinkable, again and again everything I learned seemed to tell me that the answer was “Yes.” It was the evil truth of a horrid reality; I couldn’t imagine anything worse. In those dreadful days, I never knew how limited my imagination really was. Things can always get worse. Polly Partial may have had poor eyesight, but perhaps she was more sensitive than I gave her credit for, and as her van staggered and coughed its way along the cliffs and back up to town, she uttered not a word, though I would have had a hard time hearing them if she did. I was in my own world of horror, and did not awaken until Polly Partial asked a horror-struck question of her own. “Do you smell smoke?” My organisation was particularly concerned about fires, and had spent many years training us to detect smoke with blindfold tests, midnight fire drills, and endless fire safety seminars starring a scary man dressed up as a bear, until by the time we graduated we were expected to smell smoke in our sleep. I would know the smell of smoke anywhere, and yet I did not smell it that day until Polly Partial had smelt it first. I began to realise then just how badly the morning’s events had shaken me. Any more tragedies, any more murders, and I might not be the same for years. I might not ever be the same. And I smelled smoke. A moment later, I saw smoke, too. Buildings were beginning to spring up on either side of the Partial Foods van as we re-entered Stain’d-by-the-Sea itself, and a wall of walls and roofs stretched out ahead of me. From behind them, I could just make out a column of smoke being torn apart by strong winds. “I’ll continue my investigation there,” I said abruptly. Polly Partial shrugged nervously. “If you’re sure,” she said, and continued to drive along what looked like a well-memorised route back to Partial Foods. I hoped that no more cars would be on the roads in town than usual. This was not the time for a traffic jam, or, considering who was driving, a car crash. For still the bell rang on. I wondered how much time we had left. The indistinguishable roads of uninhabitable buildings began to grow more familiar as we passed through areas I recognised. Partial Foods was growing closer. So was the column of smoke, which even Polly Partial could see now, if she took her eyes off the road. “That smoke looks awfully close to my store!” she squawked, as it loomed ahead, a great black tower that reminded me of another place I’d soon find myself hurrying to. “Oh my word, could I have left the gas on?” But a moment later we reached Partial Foods, and found it still intact, or at least as intact as it had been when I last saw it. The smoke was indeed awfully close, though. I let Polly Partial stop and I jumped out of the van almost before it was done, and I didn’t even close the door as I rushed to find the source of the smoke. It wasn’t just awfully close. It was right around the corner. The street I turned into was the most familiar in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but if it had a name, I didn’t know it, and never would. At the end of the road was a big grey building with big grey columns that had once been a city hall and had next been a library and a police station and was now only a police station. In the middle of the road the Lost Arms was now an empty building, which always looked less like a boarding house and more like a boarded-up house. And at the end of the road where I was standing was Hungry’s, and I do mean was, because it was now nothing. There was only smoke, rising up from a heap of sticks and ashes. There’s no smoke without fire, they had spent years telling me. But the fire had been and gone. There was nothing I could do. The road was busier than I had ever seen it. There were two cars stopped in the middle of the street. Also in the middle of the street were more burnt sticks and scorch marks and broken glass, flung out quite far, but nobody was looking at those. Harvey and Mimi Mitchum were standing by the restaurant’s ruins and looking up at the smoke, and in the back of their car, I saw Stew looking the same way, which was like he was about to lose weight. The other car wasn’t quite a car. You might have called it a jalopy, or an official fire department, or even a horse-drawn carriage for all I cared. The horses, too, were snorting and stomping nervously as their masked heads, so much like the Bombinating Beast’s, stared up at the smoke. But the Talkie Brothers, the town’s only official firefighters, were looking at something else I couldn’t see, something they’d put on the ground between the jalopy and the police car. I held my breath as I walked down the street. If I held it long enough, maybe I would pass out and not have to see what they were attending. A stretcher lay in the middle of the street. The Talkie Brothers were bending over somebody on the stretcher, and thank goodness, it was Hungry Hix, Jake’s aunt, covered in bandages but awake and alive. The Talkie Brothers were putting more bandages on some nasty burns and bruises that she was even more covered with than bandages. I’d never seen a hospital in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The only doctors I’d met in town were a teenage chemist and a child veterinarian. I guessed the Talkie Brothers were the town’s official ambulance service too. I hurried over. Hungry and the Talkies clearly needed some space, so I spoke to the Mitchums first. As I approached, I too found myself hypnotised by the smoking ruin. It looked like the building had been picked up and hurled to the ground by a giant with smoking fists. I’d assumed it was a fire, but it looked more like an explosion. “What happened?” I asked. “The place exploded,” Harvey said. “It looks like foul play. But we’re still looking into the situation.” “Foul play” was a nice way of saying attempted murder. I looked into the situation, too. The situation was a pile of rubble and splintered wood from which smoke was seeping. It would be some time before anyone could look any closer than just standing next to it, but foul play was exactly what they would find. The simple fact was that I knew the Inhumane Society had the means to make a bomb. I’d helped defuse one not so long ago. Another had actually gone off long before I’d even heard of the town. But it had never occurred to me that Hungry’s would be their next target, because it had never occurred to me that Hangfire would go so far. But today had proven me wrong. Moxie was dead. Pip and Squeak were dead. That just left Jake and Cleo… and me. That was hard to think about for a couple of reasons, one of which was the ringing in my ears. It had been ringing so long that it was only when I thought it had gone silent that I realised it was still there at all, and that made me realise it had been ringing for a long time now. “How long is it until the alarm ends?” I asked. Mimi checked her watch. “It’s been about an hour. Say a hundred minutes left before everyone has to be out of town, though we’ve directed most people out already,” she said. “We’d be out ourselves if we didn’t have a responsibility, but we probably won’t stay much longer.” She took a long look over at the police car. Stew was staring at the ruins like he’d stumbled into a movie he wasn’t old enough to see. Harvey followed our gaze. “We went over to Fred Bellerophon’s,” he said, “to ask him to take Stew out of town with his kids, but…” He shrugged. “There was no one home. Guess he took off already.” Then he seemed to realise who he was speaking to, and took his eyes off his son and pinned them on me. “Where’s your chaperone, Snicket?” “We had to part ways to conclude our business here in time,” I said quickly. “She went to get our luggage, and we arranged to meet up later.” Harvey shrugged. “I guess we’ll allow that, given the circumstances,” he said, and his weary voice said something else, which was that he was too tired to argue. Any other day I would have been thankful. I feared the worst. “So Hungry Hix was in there when the place was blown up,” I said, slowly, glancing back at the woman being patched up a few metres away. Mimi nodded. “Lucky to be alive. If the place had gone up a few seconds earlier or later, she wouldn’t have been blown clear out the windows like she was.” “And what about Jake Hix?” I asked, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice as though it would somehow keep the urgency out of the situation. “Where is he now?” Both Mitchums turned and looked down at me, and then at each other. It was like they were just one person, trying to decide which mouth to do the talking with. “In the fire truck, Snicket,” at last Mimi said. “Once Hungry’s patched up, the Talkies will take them out to the city.” Relief washed over me as I looked back at what passed for a fire truck. Of course Jake would be accompanying his injured aunt. It was the only decent thing to do. “I need to see him,” I said, and two huge hands grabbed my shoulders. “No, Snicket, you don’t,” Harvey said, firm as the bars of a jail cell. “You won’t find the kid you remember under that white sheet.” “Hungry was lucky to be alive,” Mimi said, hard as a brick wall. “I’m sorry, Snicket. Jake wasn’t lucky.” She might as well have smashed a baton into my brain. I’d have welcomed it. Stew Mitchum would’ve been welcome to come over and smack me with a cudgel all over again. Anything to take me out of this nightmare of a reality. The smoke-blackened fire truck pulled by its pair of horses was nothing but a hearse. As it trembled and shook in my vision, I could almost see through the very walls to where a black and blurred shadow lay waiting under its sheet. It seemed to slide through the sheet and the truck and the air and was in front of me, a sketch in smudged charcoal that filled my throat and eyes with smoke… “Easy does it, lad. Come on.” A voice I didn’t recognise was coming from somewhere, the same somewhere where a body was being gripped with strong hands and gently lowered to the pavement. A jacket had been slipped off and put under someone’s head. Something happened around a throat. The grey and black that swam in front of me started to take shape as the sky again. I felt something soft beneath my head and realised that my jacket had been taken off, my tie loosened. I hadn’t realised it had been happening to me. One of the Talkies was crouched beside me, propping my legs up on something and muttering over to the other Talkie crouching a bit farther away. That meant there was someone else beside me, too. I turned my head to the side and saw one of Hungry’s eyes looking at me. The look in her eye was like nothing I’d ever seen before, though I might have recognised it if I’d had a mirror handy. “What happened?” I groaned. “Don’t try to talk,” one of the Talkies cautioned. I don’t know if they meant me or her, but one of us ignored them. “I don’t know,” Hungry Hix said, in a low, hoarse mutter. “Since I’ve been lying here, I’ve been running through it over and over again in my head… and I don’t know. I didn’t see anything that could have caused this. I’d just walked over to the window, everything seemed normal, and then suddenly there was this great roar… and everything was bright and moving. It was like a movie. It was like hours passed in just a couple of seconds.” “You didn’t see anyone sneaking around,” I began, “or doing anything suspicious…” She raised the only eyebrow she had to raise. “What are you suggesting? Don’t be cagey, boy. I’m Jake’s aunt… and you were his friend. Do you know something about what happened here?” I wondered how much to tell her. Then I realised it wasn’t really the time to go into detail. I gave her the abridged version, which is the version where someone takes out all the parts they think children won’t want to read. “There are some people called the Inhumane Society,” I began, and saw her eye widen in recognition. “They’ve been killing people. Even today. And they’ve been known to use bombs…” “Say no more,” Hungry whispered. She started to shake her head and then evidently thought better of it. I saw the Talkie Brothers looking rattled too. They were usually the calm ones. “I know who you mean… and I know their agenda. Everyone does. But if you’re suggesting that they planted a bomb in Hungry’s, I don’t see how it’s possible.” “They couldn’t have gone behind your back?” I asked, and there was a lot to go behind. “It could have been before today…” “It couldn’t have been before today,” she interrupted, “and it couldn’t have been today, either.” Her eye flicked over to the Talkie Brothers. They’d been preparing to take her away, but now they were just listening, like me. “Okay, listen up, Snicket. There’s not much else I can do now than just lie down and talk, so that’s what I’m going to do. “Yesterday evening the saltstorm alert came around. The way I saw it, we wouldn’t be coming back to town for a while, and I didn’t know if the food I had in stock would still be good when we got back – not that there was much, but when you can’t afford much, you don’t let things just go to waste. So after I’d locked up for the evening, me and Jake did a stock take of Hungry’s, the whole restaurant – checked every nook and cranny for anything we might have left lying around. Zilch, Snicket – there was no bomb, nowhere one could’ve been hidden that I didn’t look, and don’t even think about suggesting they might’ve broken in overnight, as I’m a light sleeper. Have to be, with Jake always sneaking out to see –” She broke mid-sentence, but we were all somewhere else. Jake Hix and his sweetheart, Cleo Knight – there was nothing secret about their relationship, and we all owed them something. Jake had helped me break Cleo out of a locked basement, and Cleo had helped me defuse a deadly weapon. They’d pulled the Talkie Brothers out of a deadly trap set by Hangfire, and probably together were the only ones keeping Hungry’s afloat. I didn’t want to imagine what Cleo would do when she heard Jake was dead – but despair whispered in my ear that the way things were going, she might never find out. A moment later, Hungry went on. “I’ve been in the restaurant all morning,” she continued. “Pretty much the only one. Even before the alarm then a lot of people took this morning to get out of town, and they didn’t stop for breakfast on the way. The few people who did come in sure weren’t carting a bomb around and wouldn’t have time to hide it – they just grabbed a bite for the road, and left. Probably just as well – Jake was in and out, too, so it was just me on the ovens most of the time. “What counted as a breakfast rush passed, anyway, and left me alone in the restaurant from maybe mid-morning. What happened next – you know the layout of Hungry’s ground floor, Snicket?” I knew some of it, and she filled in the rest. Booths and restrooms at the front, and in the centre, a counter and small kitchen where all the meals I’d ever had were prepared. There was an office just off this that I’d made a phone call in once, and I learned that there was a private corridor off to the side of the office that led upstairs to the Hixs’ personal rooms. Off to the other side was an extended service area with a closet full of cleaning supplies, and round the back was a back kitchen lined with ovens they hadn’t been busy enough to use for years, and an equally empty set of freezers. If I were to draw up a floor plan, it would look something like this: “Since there were no customers, and my stock check was done, I stuck to the office to go through some paperwork – much good it did me,” Hungry continued. “I kept the office door wedged open, though, so I’d see if any customers came in – had to, as there’s been no bell on the restaurant door for years. The desk faces the wall that the door’s in, so I had a view down through the entire diner. Now, here’s the thing. Because I was focussing on the bills, I was only seeing the diner in my whatchamacallit, peripheral vision, and the angle of the desk and the door meant that I couldn’t actually see the front door itself. But if anyone had come in the front door, I’m sure I’d have heard it, and if anyone had moved through the diner, I’m sure I’d have seen them. The fact is, I had a clear view from the booth next to the front door through to the restroom doors. No way of getting behind the counter without passing my line of sight, or over to the restrooms, either – and don’t even think anyone could’ve crawled under the counter, as that’s solid to waist height. With the door upstairs to the bedrooms being right next to the office, anyone going through there would be close enough for me to see, too. In other words, anyone going between the front door and the service areas ‘round back would have to go through my field of vision. You with me, Snicket?” I nodded. “But are you definitely sure nobody could have gotten in and past you without you seeing or hearing? There’s no way they could have snuck in?” Hungry gave a slight twitch of the head which I took as a shake. “And I’ll tell you how I know, Snicket, because one person did come in, and that was Jake. He was quiet himself, probably hoping I’d never noticed he’d gone, but I heard the door click open and shut and I heard his shoes on the floor and I saw him pass the office door and go through to the service areas around the counter. And he was the only person who came in during the whole time customers had stopped showing up.” I thought some more. I hated the thought that I was becoming numb to the tragedies around me, and thought of the mysteries instead. “I suppose there’s no chance that he was an impostor?” Hungry scowled and winced. “I wish. There was only one person found in those ruins after the blast, Snicket, and more than anything, I would love to believe that it wasn’t Jake…” “No chance of recognition – the burns are too bad,” one of the Talkies whispered in my ear, words that took a detour from my brain to pummel my stomach. “…but even if I wasn’t paying attention, I know my nephew’s clothes and height and walk and especially that shaggy red hair of his,” Hungry explained. “Anyway, he came back around lunchtime, and I spent a bit more time on the paperwork before heading out into the diner to whip up some lunch of my own. Some fried bacon and tomatoes with a little basil cuts a mean pasta dish, you know, and it was what we had in the fridges at the front. I couldn’t see Jake from there, so just as soon as I had the stove lit, I knocked open the service hatch to call through to the back and freezer, but then I got distracted when that bell started ringing.” “The alarm,” I muttered, mainly for my own benefit. So this had happened a while ago, but not nearly so long as it had been since I’d ventured out that morning. Hungry nodded, or shifted slightly, anyway. Then she frowned, and it was difficult to tell if it was from confusion or pain. “Wait… After Jake went to the back, I never saw or heard from him until the explosion…” I caught the thread. “How long was that? Could someone have waylaid and attacked him?” “Twenty minutes, half an hour maybe…” Hungry was saying. “The back kitchen and freezers are completely sealed off when the doors are closed, and they swing shut on their own. If they got him quick enough, I wouldn’t have heard a thing.” Her burnt face scrunched up yet more angrily as she considered it. “But there’s still how anyone would’ve gotten in or out. It must’ve happened. But how the heck did they do it? There’s just no way in…” I thought back to what I’d seen and heard of the ground floor of Hungry’s again. Maybe there was another way in. “Isn’t there a window off in the side service area?” I asked. “I remember noticing it one time when Stew Mitchum stole some muffins. I think it was big enough to climb through.” “Huh, maybe…” Hungry grumbled. “I can’t see that window from the office. Thing is, though, that’s not the kind of window that’s really meant to be climbed through. It hinges at the bottom and opens outwards to let smoke and steam vent out, but the gap at the top is maybe only child-sized – on top of that, you’d need a ladder to get up to that level from outside, and you’d probably break it coming in, let alone going out…” Difficult, I thought to myself. Very difficult. But not impossible – especially not for a certain person… “How easy is it to open?” I asked. “From the inside? Easy, just stand on a stool and flip the latch at the top,” she said. “From outside? Can’t be done. And hey, in case you were wondering, when I was working on my own lunch, it’s not like I didn’t look in that direction. I’m pretty sure it was shut up tight, and you can only do that from the inside, too…” There were possibilities there, definitely. But once again, nothing made sense… so I changed tack. Maybe Jake was just quietly making his lunch, and his silence had nothing to do with it. “Where do you think the bomb went off?” I asked. “Could it have actually been behind the restaurant, or on the roof, or anywhere that wasn’t inside?” Hungry’s free eye stared wearily at me again. “I haven’t been in many explosions,” she muttered. “Don’t call me an expert. But it seems to me that those won’t fly. Did I tell you about the explosion itself yet, Snicket? When I heard the alarm bell, I wasn’t sure if it was real, somehow… I just couldn’t imagine this whole town breaking up after so long. So I headed over to the front door, to look out, as if there was anything to see – as if there’d be a big ol’ wall of salt looming on the horizon, about to crash down over us… And anyway, I had to flip the OPEN sign around to CLOSED. I was practically there when there was this kind of… huge rush around me, with me, and I was flying forwards right through the door in this hot blur… It was like everything in my eyes and ears was breaking apart into pieces. I couldn’t tell what was happening. I don’t know how long it was before I even realised I was lying in the street, and everything hurt, and there were bits of my diner lying around me…” She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t much. “Then people started showing up and it was too much. I guess I passed out, and when I woke up, I was lying here with the Talkies quietly working and the Mitchums talking too loud. And… I found out what happened.” Her face scrunched up again like a discarded menu. I looked urgently at the Talkies, and one shook his head slightly. It wasn’t the burns that were hurting her, or causing her breath to choke out in agonised gasps. “He kept it hidden, but Jake was such a thoughtful and sensitive boy,” Hungry whimpered. “There were incidents at school… he started keeping to his books and his recipes. When his grade closed, I told Indy – his father, my brother – that he might be better off working here rather than finding another school in the city. I told him Jake might be happier…” The sobs wracked her body, and I saw her bandages shift and stretch. One of the Talkies gestured quickly to the other, who stood up and hurried off. His footsteps returned a moment later, and so did he, carrying a small box. He opened it up. I saw the glint of something sharp inside. “I told him Jake might be safer,” Hungry wailed, her burnt face wet. “What do I tell him now?” I looked from her to the smoking ruin. I felt like crying, but there was nothing there to cry. I was wet all over anyway. I was a mess. I wouldn’t have noticed if I was crying. I hoped nobody else would notice, either, but especially not myself. I got my legs back in order. They felt wobbly, but not as far away as they had a few minutes ago. One of the Talkies offered me a shoulder to climb up on, while the other bent over Hungry’s arm with the syringe. I didn’t look at the hearse. Fire engine. I looked away. I wondered if that was the kind of person I was, the kind that looked away. Hungry’s was beyond tears. The adjoining houses were black with scorches and looked like they’d been pelted from the side with flying bricks. From what I’d seen a few minutes earlier, it looked like the back had probably burst open too and spilled out into the lot behind. An explosion on the roof would probably have brought the whole place down on Hungry Hix and Jake. Whatever happened, it had happened in there… There were possibilities, it was true. But I couldn’t do much more than store them away for now. My mind wasn’t in any state to put the possibilities together to find the truth. Not with a bell constantly tolling a mournful tone overhead. Not with everyone dying. Not on the worst day of my life. I didn’t say goodbye to Hungry or the Talkies or the Mitchums as I staggered off. They didn’t say it either. Formalities didn’t mean anything anymore. I didn’t know where I wanted to go right now. I could think of two places I didn’t want to go. I picked the nearest. Scratching an invisible obituary in the sky was a tower that gleamed like a colossal fountain pen, waiting to cross us all out.
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Post by gliquey on Nov 17, 2015 13:47:23 GMT -5
I assume, Dante, that this is roughly the point you were referring to when you joked about "the opportunity for far greater complaints about story direction" later on. I like the way this is heading. None of the deaths so far have seemed rushed or contrived; they seem tasteful while avoiding excessive euphemism or censorship of gore; each chapter has had their small allusions to the Snicket-verse like "Do you smell smoke?" I especially like the image of the "tower that gleamed like a colossal fountain pen, waiting to cross us all out."
I found the way you presented Hungry interesting. I've always seen her as a character who doesn't care much for children (with the exception of Jake), and would find their meddling 'investigations' a nuisance. I can't really think of anywhere I've got this impression from, apart from her maybe her dislike of Jake giving his friends food without them paying. Perhaps she's just shocked in this chapter, or needs to share her story with someone, but she seemed quite co-operative and willing to talk to Snicket. Not that this is a flaw, just a bit different to the way I would have imagined her.
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Post by Dante on Nov 17, 2015 17:12:00 GMT -5
Thank you for your insightful comments, gliquey. While I'll refrain from patting myself on the back for my success in pulling off a series of child murders until I hear the response to the full story, I'll go out of my way for the moment to state that, while I was stalled for quite a while in planning this final installment - I had the backstory all planned out a year ago, but I didn't know anything about the frontstory aside from that I wanted a chain walk in it and that it was going to be an alternative or parallel ending to canon - then what eventually moved me and excited me into firmer plotting was a very specific idea or theme which absolutely necessitated the events I have depicted, no choice about it. We'll see whether or not I succeeded in communicating that idea by the end.
Regarding Hungry, I felt that canon didn't really give us that much to go on, and in all such cases I feel justified in filling in the details according to what I need the details to be. She's not quite in her usual state, to be sure, but given the circumstances I felt it might be understandable if we see a different side of her. But quite aside from that, I felt she was the only person who would really have the knowledge to deliver a proper eulogy - who needed to, too, as another theme of this story is... well, you'll pick it up in a few more chapters. Regardless, canon subsequently ended up giving us about one sentence of Jake's backstory; my own interest beforehand was in filling it out a bit more than that. Well, that's ended up being half the purpose of The Stain'd Myth Murders, really; let there be impossible crime, yes, but also, let there be more backstory.
By the way, I finally paid proper attention to your avatar and understood it. Clever work.
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Post by gliquey on Nov 17, 2015 17:16:05 GMT -5
By the way, I finally paid proper attention to your avatar and understood it. Clever work. Ah, well I made it quite quickly when I was tired of my previous one, and while I think it turned out a bit dull and simplistic, I'm glad you like it.
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Post by Dante on Nov 19, 2015 5:39:35 GMT -5
CHAPTER EIGHT There were two towers that rose high over Stain’d-by-the-Sea. One of them was a lighthouse that no longer shone; the other was shaped like a fountain pen that no longer wrote. This was the former head office of Ink Inc., which was also the former home of its founders and executives, the Knight family. For a short while, it had stood empty, after Ignatius Nettle Knight and Doretta Knight closed the company and moved out of town, and their daughter, Cleo Knight, moved to a small cottage on the edge of town to continue her research. But that cottage had been destroyed not long ago, and Cleo had had to move back to her old home to continue her research. If she could create invisible ink that actually worked, based on materials found around Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the town might be revived, she thought, and she’d been throwing herself ever-deeper into her experiments in recent days as she believed she was approaching a conclusion. I stood at the foot of the tower, and looked up. It was black as far as the eye could see, with the faintest silvery gleam at the top – the mirrored nib of the pen the building modelled itself after. If you were to look into that mirror, you would see a town almost empty. You can’t save a town that’s ceased to exist; you can’t revive the dead. Who would benefit from Cleo’s research now that everything was gone, I wondered? Who was she working for now? If she was still working, that is… I shook the grim thoughts from my head. It had taken me the tiring walk to the tower to feel like I was working myself. It had been too easy to move without thinking. I had gone from dwelling on horror to being totally numb. Everything that had happened was too hard to think about. It was an effort to even notice that there were two cars parked outside the front of the building – two Dilemmas, even. They were far more impressive still than Theodora’s battered roadster, but at that moment I wasn’t interested. I barely cared who Cleo’s visitor was, though curiosity stirred from exhaustion in the depths of my brain. The front door was small and shut. There was a bell beside it, shaped like a blot of ink, but I didn’t press it, I just opened the door and walked right in. It wasn’t locked. Cleo had told me that she no longer bothered. There was nobody to answer the bell except her, and she wasn’t very good at noticing it. If any of her friends came by, they were free to come in; if any of her enemies came by, a locked door wouldn’t have stopped them. I didn’t like the way she just accepted this. It was fatalistic, a word which here means that you don’t think you can do anything to stop people from kidnapping you, and it was blasé, a word which here means not caring about being kidnapped because it had happened twice already. It was all kinds of words, and one of them, sadly, was true, which was the only one Cleo cared about. But today it wasn’t her being kidnapped that I was worried about. The last time I had visited, most of the rooms I had seen had been cramped and filled with boxes, such that I barely noticed the dark walls and grey carpets and floors tiled in alternating black-and-white. Now I saw that the house, or office, was oversized and undercrowded. It is strange to see a house or office empty of not just people but furniture as well. It feels wrong. The walls are too far and too identical. I might have walked into a different building, and I had no idea how to walk into the sitting room and kitchen and bedroom that I had visited quite some time ago. “Cleo?” I called, and my voice echoed like it had in the cave. I didn’t know where to find her, and I didn’t know if she could answer. At the far end of the room, where there had once been a wall of boxes and before that probably some very nice lamps or potted plants, were two openings with two doors, both of which were on only one of the openings. The right-hand opening was a flight of stairs that turned upwards to the right and looked like they zig-zagged upwards. I walked over to them and looked straight up. The narrow gap between the stairs looked like it went up a very long way. I stepped back, and looked at the left-hand opening, with the two doors. They were the sliding doors of an elevator. Above the doors was a dial that looked a little like the top half of a clock, with a single pointed hand shaped, again, like a fountain pen. The pen was pointing to the far right of the dial, where it appeared to be writing in large characters the number 13. Numbers counted down around the edge of the dial until they reached the number 0, at the far left of the dial, which had a little picture of an octopus drawn next to it. You are here, the octopus meant. You are here, and the elevator is there. The last person to use the elevator took it straight to the top floor. I stretched out my finger to one side of the doors to touch a button shaped like an inkblot shaped like an upward-pointing arrow, but before I could touch it I hesitated. What if whoever is up there is someone you would rather not know you were here, I thought. If I didn’t follow the person to the top floor in the elevator, I would have to walk up thirteen flights of stairs. It was what I had instinctively been considering anyway. My organisation encouraged its members not to use elevators. In case of fire, they became extremely dangerous. Thinking of fire made me think of Hungry’s. I would be thinking about it for many years. I took the stairs. My sister always said that elevators were too easy. Thinking about her made me sad, too. Yet another person who was in danger, and who I had no idea how to find. The stairs were steep and narrow. Every flight ended in an opening that looked out onto another empty floor of the building. It looked as if the wide floors near the bottom of the tower had been used chiefly as the Knight family’s home, and the floors above had been offices, wide open spaces that were totally bare, striped with light and shadow from the small windows that lined the walls. The higher I climbed, the longer it looked like since anyone had been there. The empty spaces were starting to be filled by dust and spiderwebs and silence. It could have been a ruin, centuries old. It could have been a tower from a fairy tale, the sort where there was always a princess locked up on the top floor by a king or a dragon or a wizard. Maybe a wizard who controlled the elements to bring terrible fates upon his enemies. The elements of water, earth, fire, and air… Cleo would have scoffed at such stories. So would I. Tired though I was, I quickened my pace. At the bottom of each staircase was a small sign saying what floor you were on and what floor you were going to, and in truth they did all start to blur together when they all started to look the same, dreary and grey, like a scene from one of the less exciting cinema shows. Finally, I looked upon the sign at the bottom of the thirteenth flight of stairs. 12, it said, in elaborate curving letters that pretended to be handwritten, and then there was another arrow like a fountain pen pointing upwards, and above it was the number 13. Most buildings that have a thirteenth floor pretend it’s called something else. It seemed the Knight family hadn’t believed in such superstitions. The tolling of the bell was quite distant now, through the solid walls of the Ink Inc. building, and they were quiet enough for me to hear an equally tiny sound, like a tap dripping. I listened, and it came again. It came from up the stairs. It came from on the stairs. Little was visible on those dark stairs. There didn’t appear to be any direct light from above, and the shadows had gathered in the unlit space. Something was dripping down there, but I couldn’t see what. The monochrome mansion sapped all colour from that space. I began, cautiously, to climb. It wasn’t that I was afraid of someone jumping out at me. I was afraid of a realisation jumping out at me, of a thought or a fear. As my eyes accustomed to the darkness, and as I climbed the steep steps, I began to make out the faintest shape of a strange heap just poking out onto the stairs. A dimly-glittering drip dropped from it onto the step below, ever so slowly, long seconds apart. There weren’t many steps between each floor but I climbed like there were a million. It was red. My breath caught and I had to catch at the bannister for fear I might fall. Hold it together, Snicket. It might not be what you think. It might still not be what you think. You won’t know for sure until you climb those last few steps, so don’t make any wild assumptions until then… I was just a couple of steps from the top when I stopped, and stared in disbelief. That talk about wild assumptions hadn’t been so far off the mark. The heap at the top of the stairs was made up of long pale strings stained with red. More clumps of red lay scattered messily around it. A sharp and familiar smell floated upwards from it. It was pasta. It was pasta tossed in a tomato sauce, with a few olives and anchovies mixed up in it. I even detected a hint of garlic in there. A few shards of a shattered ceramic bowl lay scattered around it. I’d spent all day learning to expect terrible things that it had been wild to expect something so trivial. It belonged in a place like this even less than my worst fears did. Why would somebody take a perfectly delicious bowl of pasta puttanesca and throw it down on the stairs? I stepped carefully around it. The stairs terminated in a small windowless landing just big enough to hold the elevator doors to my right and a small door in the centre of the wall opposite. The door was pure white against the black walls and looked somehow wrong for a home or an office, smooth and sturdy and with a window in the upper half. The window had been smashed in. The door was ajar. I stepped towards it. Beyond the door was a white room that I didn’t pay much attention to. Just inside the door, near to the ground, were two people, or maybe just one. One of them didn’t look like she planned on moving. The other wouldn’t move again. Cleo Knight lay still, her eyes closed, her skin paler than I’d ever seen it, like paper. With her almost-white hair and glasses reflecting a blank wall, it was like she was fading away to nothing, leaving just her pinstriped clothes behind. The woman holding her was wearing a dishevelled suit that was all in white, and her hair, black save for a single lock of grey, veiled her weeping face. Doretta Knight had arrived too late. So had I. I took the last few steps I had in me, enough to take me into the white room, and I slid to the floor beside them. Maybe I had hoped that Cleo was only unconscious, but her body didn’t stir. The white room had bright lights, and under them her breathless mouth looked strangely black. I wish I could have felt more, but for me, it had already happened. When Moxie had died, it was a disaster, but still, if I forced myself to look at it that way, she was just one person. Pip, Squeak, the man with them – horror piled on horror, but still, it wasn’t the worst yet; not everything had been lost yet. But when I learned that Jake had died, then that last chance was snuffed out. I had known already, even before setting foot in this tower, what I would find. There was never any chance, by then, that anyone would have been left behind. Anyone except me. There was nobody who would say it for me, this time, but I could at least say it for Doretta Knight. “I’m sorry,” I said, my throat tight. “I’m sorry about everything.” She blinked up at me. She seemed to have barely noticed I’d arrived. “You didn’t do anything,” Doretta Knight replied, her own voice as small and weak as my own. “I know,” I said, and rested my head in my hands. “That was the problem.” We sat there in silence, each of us alone, for a while. The tolling of the bell was almost silent too. It took turns with every throb of my heart. I wondered if either of us would speak. After a while, Doretta Knight looked away from her daughter and over to me again. “I’ve seen you before,” she said. “You’re the investigator boy.” “My name’s Lemony Snicket,” I said. “I’m a friend of Cleo’s.” “A friend,” she repeated, her eyes growing wistful. “I’m glad Cleo had people like that, in the end. I could never spend much time with her. Ignatius said it wasn’t the done thing for our sort of people to raise a child themselves, just as it wasn’t the done thing for Cleo to see that boy who worked in the diner.” Down went her eyes again. “I always wanted the best for her, and eventually it seemed like the best thing to do was to leave her be. But today, I received a telephone call from somebody I trusted. They told me I had to come and take Cleo out of town as soon as possible. But all the money we sucked out of this town couldn’t get me back here in time to do the right thing for my daughter.” I sat up. The right thing for Cleo – even now, I could still try. “You weren’t wrong before,” I explained hurriedly. “I’m an investigator as well as a friend of Cleo’s. If you tell me what happened –” “Then it won’t change anything,” Doretta Knight said. Once again she set her eyes on me, and they were strangely blank, and her voice was strangely tuneless. It reminded me of the first time I had set eyes on her myself, a time when she and her husband had been quite drugged out of her mind with laudanum, and I hoped she hadn’t made a habit of it. “It won’t change anything and it won’t mean anything. Not when there’s nobody left to save, and nobody left to punish.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you know something about who’s responsible for” – I gestured at Cleo – “for whatever happened?” “Oh, yes,” she said, and her eyes stared right through me as if I wasn’t there. “You see, I saw it. I saw it all. I stood outside this room and I saw my daughter attacked – saw her struck down. I saw exactly who did it.” “Then –” I struggled to join up her words. It was just like she was still drugged, and the logic behind her statements had fallen apart. “Then how can there be nobody to be punished?” “Because that’s exactly who it was,” she whispered, in a strange, hollow voice that seemed to come from far outside her body. “It was nobody… It was nobody who attacked her, and nobody who flung her across the room, and nobody who threw her down and murdered her… And when I broke into this room to save her and could only cradle her in my arms, nobody was there, and nobody left. The murderer was nobody…” Her voice, her eyes, her words seemed to stir horribly at something within my brain, as if they could turn my whole mind inside-out, back to front, twist it into something that looked at the world and saw only a chaos where the impossible was the only thing that was real… I stood up quickly, shaking. I had to shake it off. I had to have order. I had to have sense. I had to have meaning, to stop everything from having been meaningless. I surveyed the room. It looked like a small laboratory, explaining the pure-white décor. Waist-high cupboards lined the walls of the small square room, and a wide desk built on similar cupboards occupied the centre, so the path parted in front of the desk and proceeded left and right around it to meet at the back of the room. The room was a little wider than the landing that looked out onto it, and to my right, in the same wall as the door, was a square box something like an air vent or the fans you sometimes see in bathrooms, with a cord below to turn it on; in the corresponding corner to my left was a small box with white-and-black warning stripes around it and a big black button in the centre. On the left wall near the far corner of the room was a box marked “Goggles” in clear black print, and opposite that, in the cupboards on the right wall, was an odd sink with upwards-pointing faucets resembling shower heads. At the back of the room, opposite the door I had come in through, was a door-sized space with a pinstriped curtain tacked up over it with strange crudeness. I had expected the room to be filled with complex laboratory equipment which I didn’t understand, but everyone understands smashed glass on the floor. There were a few racks of test tubes and a bottle of ink at the far side of the desk, but all along the right side of the room was a trail of broken glass from which large, tube-shaped shards protruded, and in places it was damp with various chemical-looking substances, of which only one I recognised, the thick green substance that Cleo called clustergrease and which she and Hangfire both had a significant chemical interest in. Glancing back at Cleo, I saw a few shards of clear glass sticking to the damp soles of her shoes, and faint stains around the palms of her hands. “You say you saw it all,” I said, looking at Doretta Knight. “Could you tell me what you saw? What happened to Cleo?” She gave a faint nod, though she showed no inclination to move or get up, which I understood. “Alright, I’ll tell you,” she said. “It won’t do any good, but it might help you to understand… “I got the phone call this morning, and drove straight over to town as fast as I could,” Doretta explained, explaining the second Dilemma parked outside. “The town was quieter than I ever remembered, though on the road across the drained valley, I actually passed a few cars, which was rare. It was perhaps getting towards the middle of the day when I arrived back at the tower, and I was a little worried to find it unlocked – even more so when after calling around the ground floor, I couldn’t find Cleo anywhere. But I noticed her chemical equipment had gone, and that the elevator had stopped at the thirteenth floor, so I thought that maybe something had happened to her own apparatus and she had moved up here to use her grandmother’s. Climbing up thirteen flights of stairs was always too tiring for me, and there’s no point in using the stairs when you can call an elevator, anyway. So I called it down and then rode it all the way to the top floor, which took a little while as it’s an old elevator and a tall building. “When I got to the top floor, the door to the laboratory was closed, but I could see through the window that Cleo was at the far end of the room with her back to that old curtain, setting up some distillation apparatus around some green chemical over a burner – not wearing her goggles or any other safety equipment, as usual, but she told me once that she found them distracting. I tried to open the door, but it was latched, which you can only do from inside – there’s a dial you twist to lock it, if you don’t want to be disturbed. But rattling the door disturbed Cleo anyway, and she looked up at me, and I gestured to her to come and let me in. She didn’t look too keen, probably more from being interrupted than from having to leave a naked flame unattended, but she nodded, and…” Doretta trailed off, looking down at Cleo. Closer to, I was starting to notice slight scuffs and tears in her clothes, though her mother might have straightened her glasses and smoothed down her hair. “And that’s when my nightmare began,” she whispered. “Cleo suddenly staggered – it looked like she’d been hit from behind, but I couldn’t see anyone there – and a moment later she was thrown to the side, sweeping across the desk and bringing half of her equipment with her in a terrible crash. I didn’t know what had happened – I hammered on the window but got no response. From the doorway the tops of the desk and cupboards hide what’s going on in the paths around the sides, and all I could see was Cleo struggling to get up but just being dragged down again and again as she tried to reach me… At last I took off my shoe and struck it against the window until the glass smashed and I could reach in and unlock the door, and by that time…” I supplied the ending so she wouldn’t have to. “By that time it was all over.” Doretta Knight nodded. “Cleo was just lying here, reaching towards the door,” she said. “I did everything I could, but nothing… nothing would work. I haven’t moved from here since. After a while, I started to get worried… because it was as if someone had been in here. I thought I heard a noise on the stairs… But since then I’ve only heard the bell start to ring outside, and that was quite a while ago now. Nobody’s been through this room to escape, though there was no way they could get past me. And I never saw a trace of anyone else even when Cleo was being attacked…” “So when you said that the murderer was nobody…” I suggested, “…what you meant was that it was like she was fighting with an invisible man.” Doretta nodded rapidly. “Yes, just like that,” she said. “Like she was attacked by someone made of thin air, who just evaporated away…” “But there is another way out,” I pointed out. “I’m guessing there’s a door under that curtain at the far end of the room.” Doretta hesitated. “There is, but…” She trailed off, and something seemed to occur to her. “Ah. You’re one of Cleo’s friends, but you’ve never been in this room before, have you?” “It’s not a way out?” I asked, and stepped carefully around Cleo to approach it. “It’s a way out of the room,” Doretta said, as I advanced towards the curtain. “But it’s not a way out…” I lifted the edge of the curtain – it was just pinned to the wall, there was no rail to move it along or anything – and there was indeed the handle to a door, just where it was on the opposite door behind me. Whether or not it was a way out, I wanted the element of surprise on my side in case anyone was still lurking. I slowly twisted the handle, then with an awkward lunge pulled open the door and slipped through as quickly as I could. I jumped forwards and jumped back like you would if you’d touched a red-hot kettle. What lay before me was a howling and dreadful abyss I’d stepped straight into, and in my moment of panic I was certain that I had walked straight through the wall of the building and was plummeting to my death far below. The city of Stain’d-by-the-Sea lay spread out below me like a map, empty roads spreading out through a mass of decrepit buildings like an octopus’s arms, like spreading water through mud, off and into the distance until the buildings dwindled into nothingness and there was only a flat horizon spilling forth endless grey clouds. I pressed myself against the black wall of the building behind me and found my feet – not hurtling down through open space but standing on a narrow concrete balcony that extended barely a metre from the door to the edge of the abyss. Glancing left and right, I could see the balcony was rounded, too, and curved to meet the wall. It was a petrifying shock, and I stood for what felt like a long time before realising that I wasn’t actually as shocked as I thought. If I was outside, where were the freezing winds of such great heights? Why wasn’t I being chilled, or caught by them and hurled off? Why did I have a sense of being enclosed? And more to the point, why would anyone have a balcony without a railing separating you from a thirteen-storey drop? I’d never seen any such doorway as I’d just come through at the very top of the Ink Inc. building, but I had seen something else, and that gave me an idea. Tip-toeing gently to the edge of the abyss – just in case, for you never really know, even when you’re sure – I reached forward a finger, and tapped at the thin air between me and the town. It was quite hard. It was a window – a wide window, an enormous, room-sized window, one that made up the entire wall and probably even the roof of this narrow space. What was more, it wasn’t just a window – if I was right, it was also a mirror, a huge one-way mirror constructed at the very top of the Ink Inc. tower. If I were to look at that mirror from the other side, as indeed I had imagined earlier, I wouldn’t have seen straight through to the uninteresting door and concrete balcony; I would have seen the elaborate curves of the nib of a gargantuan fountain pen – a great glass sculpture built atop the tower, in full sight of the town and with the town in full sight. I had never met the late Ingrid Nummet Knight, whose mysterious death must have been around the time I was born, but I could imagine the sort of person whose idea of a break from their laboratory work was to look out over the town they lived in from the very top of a tower they had built. Indeed, she wouldn’t even have had to step out of her laboratory, as the view would have been quite visible through the window in the door behind me, though there was now a pinstriped curtain dividing the room and its view. That thought made me freeze in place, and remember the reason I had stepped out of this door at all. I had been in pursuit of the murderer’s escape route – but there wasn’t any. Just to check I ran my finger along the entire curve of the wide window between me and the town, leaving behind a smudge that blurred the town out, but the window totally sealed the balcony in. I could feel no wind from above, either, and the persistent sound of bells remained dulled. I could make out the border where the glass met the wall above. The balcony was another locked room, totally enclosed. There was no way to leave it other than the way you had come in. Even if the wide window hadn’t been there, the only way out would have been to fall. So where was the killer? I re-entered the laboratory, shutting the door firmly behind me. Doretta Knight was still lying near the doorway, gently smoothing her daughter’s hair. I didn’t disturb her, but I did take a minute to go through all of the cupboards around the room, in case anyone was hiding there. But nobody was. The killer had vanished into the thin air they were made from. Cleo, like everyone else, was unavenged – for now. But no matter what happened, I would chase the truth down. I would chase the murderer down, come what may. No matter what it took, I would make sure that he was brought to justice for what he had done. Hangfire. I wondered if I, too, could become a person who would do anything and everything. I walked around the desk to look at Doretta Knight. It was the wrong time to be asking questions of anyone, but it is always the wrong time to ask the wrong questions. But if I asked enough wrong questions, I hoped that eventually I would find the right ones – the ones that would lead me to Hangfire. It was up to me now, me and no one else, to uncover his plot and bring him down. The way to do that was to go through people who knew him. I knelt down to look Doretta Knight in the eye. “Mrs. Knight,” I said, “you said earlier that I was the investigator boy, and that you’d seen me before.” She looked at me uncertainly. It was hard to be sure, given the circumstances, but I thought that probably she always had this look about her, blank-faced, faintly confused, her mind half elsewhere and only half paying attention to what you have to say. We have all met people like this, especially people who are meant to be taking your order. “I think that’s right,” she answered. “You came to the house with that Markson woman, and…” She trailed off as I nodded. It really was a good act. I didn’t doubt, of course, that she really was grieving for her daughter, a grief which mine was a mere shadow of. But losing someone doesn’t make you innocent, or wash away your own place in a tidal wave of misfortune that has been rising for years and years. “You set eyes on me for less than a minute, with my chaperone and her name and her hair the centre of attention, over a month ago now,” I recounted. “Tell me, Mrs. Knight, exactly how do you remember me so well? Considering that you gave every impression of being incoherent from your private apothecary’s injections of laudanum at the time…” She froze up. I thought she might. She’d trailed off before precisely because she realised she’d slipped up. In her condition, it was more than understandable. It had taken me a sharp shock to startle me awake and into starting to make sense of things again. The Doretta Knight I’d only just recognised from a glimpse a long time ago, when I was investigating her daughter’s disappearance with my chaperone, had been acting completely delirious. It was a crucial part of Hangfire’s scheme at the time that she and her tycoon husband had been rendered helpless and mindless from liberal doses of laudanum delivered by Hangfire’s associate, Dr. Flammarion. Under those conditions, she shouldn’t have been able to remember a thing. But I remembered a letter she had written to Cleo a short time ago, in which she had explained quite a bit about the Inhumane Society’s history, and also mentioned that the organisation appeared to have a mole within Ink Inc. The obvious link had struck me even at the time. Who better-placed than a member of the founding family themselves? At last, Doretta began to move. She slipped away from her daughter and laid her gently down, as if she was tucking her into bed. Then she turned to me, and her eyes were like diamonds – glittering, but hard. “I think we should take this outside, Lemony Snicket,” she said, and she gestured to the curtain. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Neither was I. We slipped awkwardly through the curtain and the door. The town lay spread out before us in all its emptiness. Doretta Knight stared at it with an expression I couldn’t read but wouldn’t want staring at me. “How much do you know?” she asked at last. “Almost nothing,” I admitted. “But I can take an educated guess. You weren’t drugged by Dr. Flammarion – but you acted like you were. You were willing to play along, and he was willing to confide in you. That means that you’re a member of the Inhumane Society, and a mole within Ink Inc… and within the Knight family.” “Then you know everything,” she said in a rush. “Or everything I know, which isn’t the same thing. Only our leader ever knew everything. It was meant to be safer that way. If you were hoping I could tell you what Camarilla Flammarion was up to, I’m sorry to disappoint you. He only told me that there was a plan again, at long last.” She paused for breath, and then, in a quieter voice, she said, “and that my daughter would be safe.” What anger I had left to feel for her as a member of the Inhumane Society melted away, then. Doretta Knight reminded me of Sharon Haines, and maybe of Sally Murphy, and probably many others in town. They had betrayed a great deal, but always because there was something far, far more important that they wanted to protect. I don’t know if I would call them selfless, though I wouldn’t call them selfish either. But, in their own way, they were all alone. Alone is a terrible thing to be when everything you value is in danger. “There hadn’t been a plan for a long time,” I said, and I made it sound like I was speaking to a friend – to Cleo, maybe, not an unfamiliar, grieving version of her, twisted through an old and warped mirror. “I don’t know much about the new one. I know even less about the old one. But I think they might be the same plan, somehow, just thirteen years apart. I was hoping you could tell me something about the old plan so that I could try and stop the new plan.” “There’s only my part to tell, and it’s a small part,” she said, but she sounded ashamed enough for something bigger. “But it’s all over for me. It’s all over, and what it’s come to I don’t understand… except perhaps that, all along, the guilty one was myself.” “You?” I asked, and I looked back to where Cleo would still be. I couldn’t imagine that she could be guilty of that crime, although I faintly understood that that would be not just possible but easy. She couldn’t be guilty. But there are other ways of being responsible. “Have you heard how Cleo’s grandmother, Ingrid Nummet Knight, died?” she asked. “I heard she died from an unclear cause while alone in a locked room,” I said, and the parallel struck me like a lash from a whip. I looked back at the laboratory door. “Surely not that same room?” “Just so,” Doretta nodded. “That’s why I think what happened in there must somehow be my punishment… for what not many people know was that an item of evidence was stolen from that scene before the police could investigate it. By me, on orders.” “You had a close relationship with the Inhumane Society’s founder, from what I’d heard,” I said. “Picacea Plover. Although you’d married Ignatius Nettle Knight, you leaked information about the company’s activities to Plover and the Society to help them do battle with the company and stop its plans. But you’re saying that you went further…” “They say blood is thicker than water,” Doretta brooded, still not meeting my eye. “That supposedly means that family is more important than friendship, but Picacea felt differently. I love my daughter, and I felt something for Ignatius, I suppose… but Picacea had a cause. She was passionately opposed to the destruction of the natural world. I found that very inspiring, and helped in what little way I could. In this case, it seems her Society had an inkling that something might happen to old Ingrid, something to do with a certain item. If it did, they told me to get hold of that item along with her research notes, whatever it takes, and send it away.” “Something that the Inhumane Society wanted to get their hands on?” I asked. “Or something that would help to cover up a murder?” “I didn’t ask,” she replied. “I didn’t want to, really. Picacea had become a harder person as the years went by, and I didn’t want to know just how far she was prepared to go. But it doesn’t seem like she wanted to obtain the item herself. What she said was that I should send it to the Mallahans, the newspaper owners at The Stain’d Lighthouse.” That I hadn’t expected at all – the possibility that Moxie’s own parents were involved in the Inhumane Society’s wicked schemes. I’d yet to hear any hints of that, although on reflection, I had a suspicion that it might make a certain amount of sense… I wondered if the item was still in the lighthouse. I wondered even if it was something that I had seen. “What item was it?” I asked. “Something everyone in town would recognise, but few people had ever laid eyes on,” Doretta Knight said. “You’ve probably heard of it yourself. It’s a statue of a mythical creature known as the Bombinating Beast.” Far more often than I could ever have been happy with, during my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, I was more surprised than I should have been. I had almost forgotten about the Bombinating Beast, truth be told; Ellington had stolen it and Hangfire had suddenly ceased all attempts to get his hands on it, it had remained out of my sight for a considerable length of time, and despite its reappearance in the Swinster Pharmacy the previous day it had had no clear bearing on any of the far more important events happening since – but once again, here was the Bombinating Beast, at the heart of events thirteen years ago, and, perhaps, now. The Bombinating Beast – so it hadn’t just been sitting around gathering dust in the lighthouse for generations, just for about thirteen years or so. But did that mean it had been involved with Ingrid Nummet Knight’s death? Had it been involved with Cleo’s? It wasn’t in the room now. But neither was the murderer… “Twice you were there, and I wasn’t,” I explained to Doretta Knight. “What do you think? Do you think Ingrid Nummet Knight was murdered? And if she was… do you think Cleo was murdered the same way? By the same people?” Doretta shook her head, but it wasn’t a no. It was the long and slow and sick way you shake your head when everything is wrong. “I don’t understand why they would,” she said. “Ingrid I could see, if I’m honest, after everything else that’s happened… but I don’t see how they could have done it. I don’t see how they could have killed Cleo, either, but that’s worse, because I don’t even know why. Especially not when they were the ones who called me to –” She froze up again, and her uncertain eyes drifted over to me. Another slip-up – although I had wondered, already… “The Inhumane Society were the ones who called you,” I guessed. “Told you to rush over here and get Cleo… But you said it was someone you trusted.” The one person who was all over every word and action of Doretta Knight’s, but who hadn’t been seen for thirteen years. “Was it Picacea Plover?” Doretta didn’t reply immediately. Her eyes flicked over to the door, and then to the great wide window over the town, like she expected Picacea Plover to crawl up the walls and melt through the glass. There was a myth in town about people who could do that – and a history, too, I’d heard, of people who took it upon themselves to execute people like that. I started to remember what another figure from the town’s past had said about Picacea Plover, and why she might not have been seen for the last thirteen years. But Doretta Knight just nodded, faintly. “She told me not to tell, but it doesn’t matter now,” she whispered. “Yes, it was Picacea – her voice, unchanged from what it was thirteen years ago. It had been so long, but it brought back so many wonderful memories. But she wasn’t interested in talking about the past. She wanted me to hurry over to town as soon as I could and take Cleo away with me.” A tiny smile appeared on Doretta Knight’s pale face. “I’m glad that she’s still thinking of me, and the people I care about. It was just the same when she telephoned me the last time, around when she disappeared. Just like old times.” “What did she say back then?” I interrupted, though I didn’t like to spoil the moment. The Inhumane Society had gone quiet for thirteen years. Any light I could shed on that dark and murky period was unmissable. “She said…” Doretta Knight began, and her smile twitched for just a moment into a frown of pain. “She said that she was alright, but that it was all over for the Inhumane Society. But that none of what they’d done would rebound on me… She said I should go back to my normal life, and not get involved in anything dangerous again.” Doretta looked out over the town, to somewhere far away that I couldn’t see. “And that the only thing that mattered to her was that I was happy. She’d never said that to me before. It was so kind of her. Those words sustained me for thirteen years.” I looked out over the town, too, as if by looking far enough I could find Picacea Plover hiding herself away among the buildings and caves and secret places. Picacea Plover was another person I’d never met, but unlike Ingrid Nummet Knight, she was more of a shadow. One of the few people who’d ever mentioned her to me seemed to hate and fear her, and that person was now dead. Doretta Knight told a different story, and it was obvious she felt very different. Whoever she was, whatever she was like, she was at the heart of the Inhumane Society’s plan, even if it was now Hangfire taking the lead. I even wondered if I could have been wrong about Hangfire’s own identity… I couldn’t decide which of the stories was true. I couldn’t prove anything. But I did wonder about the kind of person who would make those telephone calls to Doretta Knight. I asked a question that I thought might help me to answer the other questions. “What would you have done,” I asked Doretta, “if you had never heard from Picacea again?” “If she’d just vanished, too, and I never found out what happened?” she asked in turn. “If in her absence, I had to assume what many other people assumed, that she was…” She stopped, and looked back at the glass of the door, at the pinstriped curtains that let us look away from death. “Do you spend much time in the library, Lemony Snicket?” I didn’t understand the question, but I could answer it. “I used to,” I said, a little sadly. “Yes, I was the same,” she said, and she was sad too. “I liked romances most of all. I read all the books there were about silly young people like me falling in love, no matter how unsuitable their love was, and tried to make them fit my own life. Picacea liked the older books, about terrible things happening to people who didn’t deserve it. Quite often they were the same books, though, and the first time we met was to read the same book at the same time. The book was about secrecy, and there was one line that never quite left me.” She closed her eyes, and I was sure she was reading the same book even then. The best ones never do leave you, for better or worse. She began to speak, but it was someone else’s words she was speaking, from long ago. “‘When remembrances of love shall be no longer the remembrances of happiness...’” Then what? I leaned towards her to catch those long-ago words. What do I do then? With her eyes still closed, she began to smile – a wide, wrong smile of a mind somewhere unreachable. “‘Then – die also.’” I turned and left the balcony. I struggled through the pinstriped curtain that hid the door, and then I thought for a moment and I reached up and tore it down, the tacks clinking quietly on the floor and waiting to stab somebody in the foot. They never would, though. Through the glass, the wide window and the wide world were all too visible. I dragged the curtain around to the other end of the room and looked down, one last time, at Cleo’s pale and forlorn body. Even in death, nobody should be abandoned. I flung the curtain outwards and let it rest over her, now only the shape of a figure raised beneath a white-and-black shroud. Then I left the laboratory and walked into the open elevator, and jammed my finger over the number 0. With a sound like a bell, the two doors slid shut, locking out the laboratory and Ink Inc. and Doretta Knight and leaving me alone in a box with my thoughts. Going down.
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Post by Dante on Nov 21, 2015 6:28:46 GMT -5
CHAPTER NINE With its paint blasted by wind and ancient spray, with not a glimmer of light from its high windowed chamber, the Mallahan lighthouse that once gave the town’s newspaper its name now resembled little but a towering extension of the clifftop on which it was built, cold, grey, and hard. Its windows were empty and dark, and there was no sign of life stirring within. The long tolling of the bell, surely soon to end, was accompanied only by the shrill rush of wind and the distant rumble of departing cars. The streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea also were empty and dark, and although I felt the eyes of ghosts in broken windows and heard skittering steps just on the edge of imagination, I had met nobody since departing from Doretta Knight at Ink Inc. Even Theodora’s roadster had failed to make it to the lighthouse, where I had asked her what felt like weeks ago to meet me. I wondered if she, too, was dead, or if she had simply fled the town as well on seeing which way the wind was blowing. She had sense enough, at least, to know when to run for her life. I, on the other hand, did not, for here I was, ringing the doorbell of the lighthouse, and then knocking in case the doorbell wasn’t working, and then opening the door and walking right in in case the homeowner was, as was usually the case, unwilling to get out of bed that day. To my surprise, though, the homeowner was not just out of bed but actually dressed, although I doubted he had been entirely willing. Mr. Mallahan was standing at the foot of the stairs, wearing a battered old suit that looked like it had been stuffed into a corner of a wardrobe for as long as its owner had been stuffed into a corner of his lighthouse. Mr. Mallahan was ashen-faced, a phrase used to describe people whose hopes have all gone up in smoke, and I was probably the same. Grey suits and grey faces, entombed in grey stone and beneath a grey sky; that was what all our hopes had come to. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “You’re the investigator boy.” “My name’s Lemony Snicket,” I said. “I’m a friend of –” No. The conversation, too, was grey and tired and old. It seemed, at last, that there was nothing new in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, least of all at the headquarters of a newspaper that was no longer printed, in a lighthouse that no longer shone. Mr. Mallahan seemed to understand an incomplete statement, though, and gave me a sad and tired nod. “So I suppose you know,” he said, and wearily beckoned me over. “Follow me,” he said, and turned to trudge up the stairs. His words and actions had the exhausted meaninglessness of a slave. I wondered what I was supposed to know, and the only answer I came up with was “too much and too little.” We traipsed up the stairs for a couple of flights before stopping at a door I’d never been through, only past, and which seemed to sit awkwardly in its frame. He gestured to the door. “I suppose you’ll want to see her,” he said. I was touching the handle before what he had just said sunk in, and the most wild and unbelievable ideas filled my head. See who, and how? There seemed only one answer, and yet the terrible events of the morning flashed through my head in a gallery of crushing misery. I had a moment of wild optimism in which I wondered if I had been wrong somehow, astonishingly and colossally wrong. I thought of what had happened, and asked myself the wrong question. I opened the door with a flicker of hope in my heart, something I should have known to extinguish. The room was a bedroom, and it didn’t take a detective to know that it was Moxie’s. On the walls there were several pictures of a younger Moxie and Mr. Mallahan standing together with a woman I’d never seen, and several more of them nearer their present age and separately. There was a noticeboard with various newspaper clippings on subjects I recognised pinned up, and on a desk was a spiral-bound notepad and a broken typewriter which someone had been trying to fix, and there were a few old papers piled up neatly next to the bed, and lying on the bed beneath a rippling curtain was Moxie Mallahan. In that one moment, everything changed. Moxie had never died, she’d just been resting at home – the body I saw had been a fake, some kind of dummy or impostor – the inexplicable appearance and disappearance were nothing but parlour tricks of no substance. Moxie would sit up and run over and I would ask her what the news was, and she would have found the Bombinating Beast and solved the mystery, and Hangfire would be defeated and the town saved and everyone would live happily ever after. I still think about that moment sometimes, the moment before the moment passed, and everything was the same again. The scenery had changed, but it was still the Moxie I had seen in Wizard’s Hollow – lying slumped on her side, pale and ever so slightly damp, her bulging eyes and black mouth frozen in undying horror. I must have stood there a while, for Mr. Mallahan to have gently leaned over my shoulder and pulled the door shut. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I had never heard anyone who sounded sorrier. “I truly did think you knew.” “I’m sorry, too,” I said, leaning back against the wall in case I wouldn’t stay up on my own. “I did know, but…” But I knew that she was dead in a death-black and crypt-cold cave halfway up a cliff, where her body appeared and disappeared as if by magic, I didn’t say. Nobody should have to know that their daughter’s body had been found in such a place. Nobody should have to know that their daughter’s body had been found. And yet, despite everything, he had found it, nowhere near where it should have been. “I did know,” I concluded, “but I didn’t know where.” He nodded, and began trudging back downstairs. He might have forgotten me, or maybe he didn’t care what I did. I followed him, trying to sort out the bizarre and tangled story of Moxie’s death in my head. I knew now where Moxie’s body had disappeared to, but that brought me no closer to knowing how it had so mysteriously moved. There was something else I didn’t know, either, and which I should have thought about, but this has never been the story of how I asked the right questions. Mr. Mallahan wandered into a small room I recognised, lined with bookshelves and with two large chairs and the impressions of a third which was no longer there. One of the chairs was surrounded by heavy books with uninteresting dustjackets sporting sombre titles about the decline of traditional media and how to be a single parent, and this one Mr. Mallahan slumped into, and let his head fall back and his eyes close. The other chair was surrounded by stacks of typewritten pages. I decided to stand. The room was dark. Neither of us bothered to turn a light on. “Tell me what happened,” I said to the limp form. “I can’t make this right, but I can find the truth.” Mr. Mallahan groaned, and shook his head the way people do when they’re having a nightmare. “What’s the point?” he moaned. “What’s the point?” I repeated, disbelieving and disappointed. “You’re a journalist. Your daughter was a journalist. Your wife was a journalist. Your ancestors were journalists.” “I was a journalist,” he said, “and I was a father. Now I’m nothing. The truth won’t change the past.” “You don’t know what the truth might change,” I said, “until you tell it to someone else.” Mr. Mallahan folded himself over and put his head in his hands. He stayed like that for a little while, muffled sobs and muffled ringing sounding dimly in the grey room. Then he ran his hands through his thinning hair, and I saw the glitter of his wet eyes as they settled on some pictures against the wall, two and one empty space. “There’s little to tell,” he admitted, in a low voice. “I… haven’t gotten up much lately, so most of what I can tell about my daughter’s activities amounts to hearing the front door slam. She was in and out all yesterday evening with her friends. I heard a car drive up as evening was coming on and she left once then, and then later brought her back just before dark. I heard the door slam a couple more times after dark, and then the car left and I eventually fell asleep, and it must have been a quiet morning as I slept through that too. But around midday today I heard a car drive up, and then I thought I heard a rattling downstairs, like somebody struggling with one of the windows. It kept up for a little while, and that made me worry about burglars and my Moxie… I managed to get up and hurry to her room, but it was too late. Her door had been broken open and her window forced from outside, and there she lay, as you saw her.” I didn’t like to think of what he must have thought and felt, to find her there. I didn’t know if it was better or worse to find her like that, or find that someone else had found her in a dingy cave as I had. I wondered if it might have been better for her never to be found at all, and then tried to think of something else. “What about the car?” I asked. “I heard it drive off, but I wasn’t really paying attention anymore,” he mumbled, his voice strained. “I was in a daze for a while… I was only really roused from it when I realised that the bell had started ringing and not stopped. I’d ended up downstairs, and there was a flier on the table about a saltstorm that would endanger the lives of anyone who didn’t leave town before the bell had stopped. That’s when I knew what I had to do. I went up to my wardrobe, changed into this suit, and waited.” The end of his story confused me. “Waited for what?” I asked. Mr. Mallahan gestured sadly to the suit. “This is the suit,” he said, “that I wear at funerals.” The image of Doretta Knight with her daughter in a bright room came to me, meeting this man in his dark room, and I understood – I understood what he meant, though I wasn’t sure I could ever understand his feelings. The two of them were the same, really. They had no intention of leaving town. Neither, I remembered with a start, did I. Was I like them? Was I, too, sacrificing myself? I’d find out very soon. I surely had very little time left before the long period of the bell’s final tolling came to an end, and Hangfire unleashed his final plan upon Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I had to get the information I needed to solve the mystery – not just the mystery of my friend’s deaths, but the mystery of Hangfire, the mystery of Stain’d-by-the-Sea itself. I wondered why it had never occurred to me before to speak to a man who had been there for it. I wondered why I had asked Moxie to search through her newspaper archives, rather than talking to the man who had written them. But here he was, and he was going nowhere, and neither was I. Now was the time to ask questions. “Before… today,” I began, “Moxie was investigating a big case with me. A big case with strong ties to this town’s past. It had to do with an organisation called the Inhumane Society.” His eyes widened when I mentioned an organisation, and he briefly looked scared – but then he looked a little less scared when I mentioned the name of the organisation. That, too, made no sense to me. But there was something that made even less sense. “Why,” I asked, very slowly, “considering the lengths it went to protest against and sabotage Ink Inc., is there so little information in the archives of The Stain’d Lighthouse about the Inhumane Society?” It had never made sense. Moxie had barely been able to dig up any information about this group, even though they’d blown up a statue of a war hero along with the war hero himself. There should have been dozens of articles and investigations. You couldn’t just slip the right issues out of the archive, either; this story had been very deliberately suppressed, and Mr. Mallahan’s scared eyes showed it. His eyes flicked nervously to the space on the floor where the impression of chair legs remained, to the pale square on the wall where a picture had once been hung. “My daughter may be dead,” he stammered, “but I still have a wife, in the city… I can’t possibly afford to tell you something like this. If you’re asking these questions, you should know that.” “You were being threatened,” I said, “and still are.” He nodded jerkily. “By the Inhumane Society.” “What?” he let slip. “No, by –” And then he slapped a hand over his mouth, and looked over at the door. There was nobody there and never would have been, not now, but the time was when there had been somebody very nearby who’d been holding an axe over his head, and he still saw it over his wife’s neck. “Why would anyone else want to protect the Inhumane Society?” I pressed him. “Unless… it wasn’t for the Inhumane Society’s sake that they wanted to suppress the story?” “I think you should leave,” he said, not getting up. His fingers were running all over each other like rats in a sewer. “Was it Ink Inc.?” I demanded. “Or people tied to that company?” “Please stop,” he said, almost begging me now. He was either sweating or crying. “There are some very powerful people in this town. If they find out that I talked, they’ll –” “They’re all dead,” I interrupted. He looked at me like I’d just told him that grass was blue and water was bright green, which is another way of saying “incredulously,” since I hadn’t defined the word earlier. “They’re what?” “I assume you’re talking about people like Colonel Colophon, Lansbury Van Dyke, Cotton Haines,” I said, listing a number of powerful and influential individuals who I had heard were linked to the founding of Ink Inc. “You haven’t been getting out much, by your own admission, so you won’t have heard that all three of them were murdered recently – by people linked to the Inhumane Society.” Mr. Mallahan was shaking like the egg in an egg and spoon race. “Then… they took their revenge at last…” The shaking wasn’t fear. It was relief as felt by somebody who didn’t know how to handle it. It was almost worrying. I wanted to offer him a seat, but he was already sitting down. Instead I walked quickly into the kitchen and poured him a glass of water. “You can either drink this,” I said, as I returned, “or I can splash it over your face.” He reached out with a trembling hand and took the water, spilling half of it before it got to his mouth, and then drank it, in a single, long gulp. He coughed and spluttered as he put the glass down, but looked a little better. “Thank you,” he whispered, when he was able. “I just don’t know how to feel. It’s such a terrible day, but if you had told me that on any other day…” “It would’ve been good news,” I finished for him. “You wanted them dead too.” “I wanted them out of town,” he said. “They were poison, them and Ingrid Nummet Knight. They were slowly killing this town, and the newspaper was one of the casualties. A newspaper that can’t report the truth is like a forged banknote – not worth the paper it’s printed on. But when those four people rose to power, they started using it to suppress any story that made them look bad.” “Why didn’t you report that?” I asked. “Corruption and intimidation are nothing new, but that doesn’t mean a newspaper shouldn’t report it.” “Because we couldn’t pin anything on them,” he said. “Nobody could. Businesses that competed with Ink Inc. had mysterious accidents and shut down, people who criticised them were attacked late at night, elected officials who didn’t support them became the victims of nasty rumours… and The Stain’d Lighthouse was told that if we didn’t keep any bad stories hushed up, the same would happen to us. After a few incidents, we realised that we’d have to toe the line as well. We stopped printing any story that even mentioned Ink Inc. if it hadn’t come from the company itself… But none of it was tied to Ink Inc. Whenever the saboteurs left a name, in fact, it was that of a different organisation – something called the Canute Company.” “The Canute Company?” It rang a bell with me. “I visited Cotton Haines shortly before her death, and she mentioned something of the sort,” I said. “Something about them having defeated a witch…” “I don’t know anything about that,” Mr. Mallahan said, looking puzzled. “But before my wife and I lost the habit of asking questions, our neighbour, Mrs. Sallis – you’ve probably seen the Sallis mansion across the way – told me that when she was at the Wade Academy as a little girl, the Canute Company was the name privately used by a certain clique. ‘Clique’ is the word for a group of friends who think they’re better than everyone around them.” “I know what that word means,” I said. “Everyone’s encountered one of those. And you don’t need to tell me who was in this clique, either.” He nodded. “It seems they named themselves after an old king who tried to hold back the sea. Their ambition was to have the same kind of power.” “Everyone gets that story wrong,” I replied. “Canute couldn’t hold back the sea. He never even thought he could. He was trying to make a point about how people didn’t have the power to do such things.” “Well, the Canute Company proved him wrong,” Mr. Mallahan said. “Even if it had to wait until the second generation of Knights to come about, though the plan was certainly Ingrid Nummet Knight’s. She was still in charge of the company at the time the plan was being proposed, and it only passed to her son after her sudden death, which was reported – which we reported – as from natural causes, though there were rumours…” “I’ll bet there were,” I said, “and I bet you knew more about those than you let on. I heard recently that you were mailed a very interesting item around the time Ingrid Nummet Knight died.” His eyebrows rose in surprise. “How did you know about that?” he said, astonished. “Yes, we got a package – some research notes, and a statue that Ingrid Nummet Knight had bought from us a little while before for no reason I can imagine. We stuffed the statue up in a dusty corner of the lighthouse where nobody would notice it; as for the research notes, we couldn’t make head nor tail of them, but considering that we couldn’t publish them and didn’t exactly want to help out the company either, we ended up just burning them…” Burning valuable evidence. It made my heart sink. The journalists in this town really had sunk low. “So, what happened to the Canute Company after that?” I asked. “I’m not sure exactly,” he said. “Nobody could explain Ingrid Nummet Knight’s death, so it was assumed that she’d simply passed away of some undiagnosed illness – unfortunate, but not anyone’s fault, exactly. Not long after that, though, was the unveiling of the statue of Colonel Colophon, commemorating his heroic actions in the war, though there were some nasty rumours about that, too. But on the day itself – well, if you’ve been investigating this case, you probably already know what happened there.” “The Inhumane Society set off a bomb at the statue,” I said. “The statue melted like a snowman and Colonel Colophon was severely burnt.” “There was some dispute at the time as to what the Inhumane Society had intended,” Mr. Mallahan mumbled. “Did they mean to harm anyone at all, or had they actually planned to kill Colophon? But it didn’t matter. There was an almighty witch hunt for the members of the Inhumane Society, and those who hadn’t already gone underground did so. There were numerous unexplained fires or accidents which the police were encouraged not to investigate, but it wasn’t clear which side was responsible… It may seem hard to believe, but it seemed like the whole town might be torn apart – and in the middle of all this, The Stain’d Lighthouse was pressured to report that everything was business as usual. No wonder people stopped reading the newspaper, when the news was off the page and on their doorstep.” “But there was a story eventually,” I remembered, thinking of what I’d learned during the first of my investigations into the Stain’d Myth Murders. “Lansbury Van Dyke, one of the town’s heroes – and, you say, a member of the Canute Company – publicly declared that he’d release a list of names of the members of the Inhumane Society unless they disbanded and stopped causing trouble. Somehow or other, it worked.” “That was one of the few stories we were allowed to print,” Mr. Mallahan explained. “Goodness knows where he got that information from – spying on the few people who weren’t ashamed to admit their allegiances, perhaps. But everyone wanted an end to this business, and when a certain number of people suddenly upped sticks and left town forever, things seemed to quieten down.” “Including a person I’ve heard was the leader of the Inhumane Society at the time,” I said. “It’s strange, though. This Picacea Plover doesn’t sound like the sort of person who’d just lie down and admit defeat.” Mr. Mallahan coughed awkwardly. It was the kind of cough people tend to make not because they’re suffering from a cold, but because they want to avoid speaking. The kind of cough people make when they’re embarrassed, or ashamed. “Well, people did think it was strange, privately,” he admitted. “But nobody really wanted to investigate and risk stirring things up again. Picacea Plover vanished, and who was going to ask questions? Not the press, nor the police. We…” His lip curled, as if he had caught himself about to say something unpleasant. “We knew our place,” he said, but he didn’t sound happy about it. It’s not as rare a situation as it should be. The people whose job it is to ask questions suddenly decide they’re not interested, so who asks questions then? Sometimes, nobody, and those are dangerous times, but other times there are people willing to ask the awkward questions and look for answers that might upset people. I’d met some of them, and heard of many others. It was what my organisation was meant to be for, after all. But it wasn’t our job. We wouldn’t get paid for it, and we probably wouldn’t get thanked for it either. It’s not an easy life, but it is an important one, being a volunteer. I wondered if any volunteers had asked questions back then, or afterwards. I could think of one, perhaps. Maybe even two. But I wasn’t in a position to speak to either of them. Instead it was down to me. “So all this happened about thirteen years ago,” I said. “What’s happened since then?” He shrugged sadly. “Nothing. It felt like those terrible days sucked out all the events that should have happened over thirteen years, and there was nothing left afterwards. Ignatius Nettle Knight announced that he’d be continuing with his mother’s plan to drain the sea, and take it as an opportunity to concentrate octopus schools in easily-accessible caves. More and more people left town and more and more jobs vanished. Tourism dried up. We stopped having anything to print at all. Eventually it seemed as if everywhere had closed its doors. And all because the sea was drained…” “I wonder what Ingrid Nummet Knight really wanted to drain the sea for,” I said. “I haven’t a clue,” Mr. Mallahan said. “But I don’t think it was anything to do with the octopi. Ink Inc. had only gotten better at chasing them down through the sea. She must have had something else in mind.” He sighed. “But then she died, and over the past thirteen years, so did everyone else. My daughter wasn’t even born at the time, but even she’s dead now. I don’t know what’s happened to my wife or my town. I don’t know when the Inhumane Society came back, or why, or who’s in charge. And I don’t know what anyone can possibly do about it.” “That doesn’t mean that nobody should try.” I picked myself up. Straightened my filthy clothes. Tried to look like I came from a noble tradition. “Even after everything that’s happened, I’m not going to give up. I’m going to stop the Inhumane Society.” Mr. Mallahan let out a humourless and desperate bark. It might have been a laugh. “You,” he said, in a mournful voice, “and what army?” “Maybe an invincible army, but not a victorious one,” I replied. “Have you ever heard of V.F.D.?” He looked startled. “Of course. The time was that they were good friends with the press. The organisation used to send people to this town on rare occasions – delinquents, to be reformed by hard work in a place where they could do no harm. Are you saying that you’re a member?” “Another delinquent, I suppose,” I said. I crooked my left leg and tapped my ankle. “Who else in town knew about V.F.D.? Do you know how many volunteers were in town?” “Barely anyone, to both questions,” he said. “At that time the organisation had already gone underground itself, and the only people who knew it was still around were those the volunteers worked with – journalists and librarians. A few years after the sea was drained, the town got a new sub-librarian who I assumed was a volunteer, and a few years before the sea was drained, we were asked to take in an apprentice and teach him to respect deadlines. He turned in a few nature articles quite late and eventually told us his organisation had summoned him back.” “Do you remember his name?” I asked, and he gave me the name I was expecting. Case closed. “That’s all I needed to know,” I said, and I turned to the door. “What will you do now?” Mr. Mallahan looked around the dark room, and then looked down at his hands, and then looked over at a picture of his daughter. “None of this has anything to do with me anymore,” he whispered. “I’ve failed as a father and as a journalist. I couldn’t do anything… so all I have the right to do now is nothing.” He gave me a stony-faced look. “Don’t try and stop me,” he said, “please.” Don’t try and stop me from doing nothing. I walked out. I tried not to let it show that it was a struggle, tried not to show it to him or to myself. I felt wretched, too. I felt like throwing myself down on the floor and weeping and then lying there come what may. I felt like letting everything just wash past. I felt like everything was so hopeless and miserable and wrong that there was no point in getting more tired and miserable by trying and failing to do anything about it. I felt like it would be so much easier if I just admitted defeat the way I had been defeated. I could learn about the past but I couldn’t change it. What kept me going was that there was still a glimmer of something like hope. I couldn’t change the past, it was true. Maybe I couldn’t even change the present. But one of the things my organisation taught me, and which I have always, always thought was true, was that learning about the past did change the future. It could expose crimes and prevent mistakes and teach us how to go forward when there didn’t seem to be any way. And even if it couldn’t do any of that, I still believed that it was right just to know. That it was more important for truth to survive than lies even if neither of them held any power. Somehow, I still believe that, and it was what kept me going for each step as I walked out of the lighthouse and turned to close the door behind me, and the heavy sound it made as it shut seemed to resound in the empty silence. I stopped. Something was wrong. Or rather, everything seemed like it was wrong. I had stopped, and everything had stopped with me. The door and my hand and the grey walls of the lighthouse felt somehow like a photograph, no movement, no sound, just a single snapshot in time, isolated. That was what was wrong – I had a sudden, terrible feeling of loneliness, as if the entire world had gone away and left only me in it. Me, my hand still clutching the handle on the door, was the only reality there was, and everything else had stopped, or vanished. The ringing of the bell had stopped. There were no sounds. There was no movement. Everything had stopped, in that moment of time, pausing for breath, waiting. Waiting for some terrible enormity. Waiting for me to turn around, and see the person waiting behind me. She had kept me in suspense for long enough.
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Post by gliquey on Nov 22, 2015 9:26:23 GMT -5
"high windowed chambered" - high windowed chamber?
Oddly enough I found this chapter to be the most emotive yet, despite no new deaths. Maybe it's just the mood I'm in right now, but the passage where Snicket sees Moxie again was chilling and very sad.
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